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HOW MUCH IS LEFT OF 
THE OLD DOCTEINES? 

% 25oDfe for tlje ^to$\t 

BY 

WASHINGTON GLADDEN 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIX AND COMPANY 

(Ct)E 0itJcr»iDe l^resfg, Cambribge 

1899 



:bt77 



.GrS 



TWO COPIES RECEIVED. 

Library of CongretS| 
Offic« of tht 

N0V1818Q9 

Register of Copyrlghtik 

48593 

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY WASHINGTON GLADDEN 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



SECOND COPY. 






T 

£ PEEFACE 

This Httle book, like " Who Wrote the Bible ? " 
is not for the scholars, but for the people. No 
claim to special theological or scientific knowledge 
can be set up by the writer ; he has only sought to 
bring together the terms of the theological equa- 
tion as they are understood by many well-instructed 
men of the present day. The need of cancellation 
is made apparent by such a restatement : we get 
rid of fractions, and secure a more intelligible 
theory of religion. 

It will be evident to the reader that these chap- 
ters have been submitted to the test of popular 
presentation. Their direct and familiar style is 
not the result of literary artifice ; they are the 
words of a man speaking face to face with his fel- 
low men. Sometimes, as on pages 57 and 58, the 
illustrations are drawn from the immediate sur- 
roundings, and would lose all their force if the 
circumstances were not permitted to appear. No 
apology is therefore made for letting these words 
go forth in this colloquial form ; the purpose which 



IT PREFACE 

they are intended to fulfill wonld not be secured 
by Hterary reconstruction. 

In tiying to state the substance of what is be- 
lieyed at the present day it has been necessary to 
make many quotations ; these are part of the ail- 
ment, generally the besfc part of it, and I have 
inoorpoiated them in the text where they belong, 
instead of segregating tiiem iu appendices or foot- 
notes. 

First Coy.sREGAXiO'Ai Chusch, 

Co-LZTSBTs, Ohio. Oetnber 25, 18991 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. PAGE 

I. Belief in God 1 

II. How THE Worlds were Made ... 28 

III. What is the Supernatural ? . . . .46 

IV. What is the Bible ? 65 

V. Is THERE A Personal Devil ? . . . .84 

VI. What do we Inherit ? 112 

VII. The Doctrine of the Trinity . . . . 133 

VIII. The Word made Flesh 157 

IX. How Christ saves Men 174 

X. Predestination 196 

XI. Conversion 2l9 

XII. The Meaning of Baptism .... 240 

XIII. The Significance of the Lord's Supper . . 260 

XIV. The Hope of Immortality .... 280 
XV. The Thought of Heaven 301 



WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD 
DOCTRINES ? 



BELIEF IN GOD 

The time has come for some of us who call our- 
selves Christians to take an inventory of the be- 
liefs of which we find ourselves in possession. The- 
ological labels we are constrained to decline until 
the meaning of some of them is better defined. 
Orthodox we know that we are not, if that implies 
subscription to creeds framed in the sixteenth cen- 
tury; and if Liberalism is mainly criticism and 
denial, or if, as is widely assumed, it signifies de- 
fiance of all wholesome restraints and conventions, 
then we are not Liberals. But we still profess 
and call ourselves Christians ; and we need to 
make clear to our own minds just what this in- 
volves, so far as concerns the intellectual life. We 
may be misunderstood by those to whom the wear- 
ing of the aforesaid labels is a matter of great 
importance, but that need not disturb us if we only 
understand ourselves. 

The main question before us implies that 



2 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

changes have been taking place in the old doc- 
trines ; that portions of them are obsolete or 
obsolescent; that in form and content they are 
different now from what once they were. This 
implication will at once be challenged. Doctrines 
that are true, it will be said, cannot be mutable ; 
they must be as true for one generation as for 
another. A creed that is constantly reshaped must 
be a compend of error. But shall we say that 
the vine which has now of branches and of clusters 
fivefold more than it had five years ago is not a 
true vine ; or that the gray-bearded sage who thirty 
years ago was a man in his stalwart prime, and 
thirty years before that a ruddy-faced youth, just 
passing out of adolescence, and twenty years be- 
fore that a helpless infant in his mother's arms is 
not a true man ? Is not every living thing con- 
stantly changing, not only its form, but its sub- 
stance ? If Christian doctrine is a living thing, it 
must be undergoing changes. 

Christian doctrine consists of the opinions and 
beliefs of men concerning God and his kingdom. 
As the generations pass, and men learn more about 
themselves and the world in which they live and 
the works of God in the world, their point of view 
changes, and their doctrines are modified by their 
growing knowledge. 

" Nay, but," some wise man will say, " Christian 
doctrine is all drawn from the Bible, and the Bible 
does not change ; the truth is all there ; all we have 
to do is to interpret it rightly, and then we have 



BELIEF IN GOD 3 

the everlasting and unchangeable truth." That 
statement is not quite correct, for our doctrines, if 
they are true and complete, are drawn from other 
sources as well as from the Bible. They are drawn 
also from our knowledge of ourselves, and of the 
world in which we live. But, even admitting all 
this, it is still true that the enlargement of our 
knowledge, and the change in our point of view, 
lead us to interpret the Bible differently. We do 
not take the same view of the Bible itself that once 
we took ; it is quite impossible that we should. 
We have studied it more carefully, we have gone 
to the Bible itself to find out what kind of book 
it is, and the Bible has plainly told us that it is not 
the kind of book that we once thought it to be. 
It is a better book, a far more useful book, but it 
is a different book. And therefore, because our 
view of the book has changed, and our methods of 
interpreting it have changed, our doctrines, even 
in their Biblical elements, must have undergone 
considerable change. 

One who accepts the Bible as authority should 
look for changes in theology. One whole book of 
the New Testament, the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
is devoted to the description of a great doctrinal 
evolution. The writer shows how the Christian 
dispensation had been substituted for the Jewish 
dispensation ; how an old theology had given place 
to a new theology. "For if that first covenant 
had been faultless," he says, " then should no place 
have been sought for the second. ... In that he 



4 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

saith a new covenant, lie hath made the first old. 
Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready 
to vanish away."-^ 

In God's progressive revelation of himself to the 
^vorld there is always that which decayeth and 
waxeth old, and is ready to vanish away. The 
revelation is always through life, and this is the 
process of life. " Dying, and behold we live " is 
a biological law. It is only by the waste and 
destruction of old tissues that new tissues are 
formed. 

And yet, although our bodies change in form 
and size and appearance, and although the mate- 
rials of which they are composed are constantly 
changing, they are the same bodies ; the principle 
of identity is there ; there is a continuity of life 
and experience which is a fact no less positive than 
the fact of perennial change. And in like man- 
ner the writer to the Hebrews shows that the es- 
sential truth of that old covenant survives, under* 
changed forms, in the new. This is what, as I 
trust, we shall find in these studies. " We have 
kept," says Dr. Sabatier, " and still repeat the 
dogmas of early times ; but we pour into them un- 
consciously a new meaning. The terms do not 
change, but the ideas and their interpretation are 
renewed with each generation. This is particu- 
larly the work of the theologian. We spend our 
time, consciously or unconsciously, in putting new 
wine into old bottles. There is not a single dogma 

^ Heb. viii. 



BELIEF IX GOD 5 

dating from two or three centuries back whicli is 
repeated with the same meaning as in its origina- 
tion. We still speak of the inspiration of the pro- 
phets and of the apostles, of atonement, of the 
Trinity, of the divinity of Christ, of miracles ; but, 
whether in a o-reater or a less deo:ree, we under- 
stand them differently from our fathers. The river 
Hows on, even when the waters are apparently stag- 
nant at the surface. But the elasticity of words 
and formulas has a limit. There comes a time 
when the new wine causes the old bottles to break, 
and when it becomes necessary for the church to 
make new vessels to receive it. Then new words 
appear in languages and new dogmas in theology. 
It is thus that the dogmas of justification by faith 
and of universal priesthood came into prominence 
in the sixteenth century. Xew dogmas, do we call 
them? Eather, we should say, old ones rising 
aofain with new enero-v.'' ^ 

" How much is left of the old doctrines ? " is 
the question we are asking. Our study will show 
us that though the phrases which we use are modi- 
fied, and some of the conceptions are altered, the 
substance of the old truth remains. 

What do we mean by the old doctrines '? I shall 
not go back very far : I shall consider only the 
doctrines that were generally believed in our evan- 
gelical churches in England and America from 
fifty to one hundred years ago. in days which some 
of us can well remember. Within the last half of 
^ The Vitality of Christian Dogmas, pp. 4S-4o. 



6 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

this century some important changes have been 
taking place. It was in 1838 that the New School 
Presbyterians in America separated from the Old 
School ; it was in 1831 that McLeod Campbell 
was excommunicated from the Scottish church ; it 
was in 1850-51, that Dr. Horace Bushnell, in Hart- 
ford, was on trial for heresy ; it was in 1859 that 
Darwin's " Origin of Species " was published ; and 
the rapid movement of thought in the theological 
and in the scientific world since those days has re- 
sulted in the modifications of belief which we are 
now to consider. 

The first question before us concerns the central 
doctrine of theology, — the doctrine of God. Has 
that doctrine essentially changed during the last 
half of this century ? Are our beliefs about God 
the same beliefs that were generally held fifty 
years ago ? 

There are those among us who will say very 
positively that the old doctrine of God has become 
antiquated ; that intelligent men no longer accept 
the theory of the existence of such a Being as our 
fathers believed in and worshiped. Some of them 
will recall the rather contemptuous use by Matthew 
Arnold of the common definition of God, " a per- 
sonal First Cause that thinks and loves, the moral 
and intelligent Governor of the universe," and of 
his reiterated statement that this definition cannot 
possibly be verified. Some of them will remember 
the many arguments of Mr. Herbert Spencer, which 



BELIEF IN GOD 7 

maintain that although there may be such a God 
as this, we do not and cannot know anything about 
him ; that if he exists he is unknowable. 

What we do know, say some of these philo- 
sophers, is the existence of a nniverse, a mighty 
aggregation of forces, marvelously coordinated and 
cooperating for the production of the results we 
see about us ; a Cosmos, or Universal Order, which 
we cannot help regarding with wonder and awe, 
toward which our deepest feelings must be akin 
to those of worship. Some of these sturdy doubters 
and deniers seem to understand that this very feel- 
ing of awe and worship of which man can never 
rid himself must signify something. So Strauss 
insisted that those who, with him, had thrown away 
the old theology had still a religion ; that before 
this mighty Cosmos itself they still bowed down 
with reverence. And truly, if a man will take 
time to think — to get into his mind some concep- 
tion of the universe in which he lives — he will be 
forced to wonder and to worship. " This Uni- 
verse," cries Carlyle, " what could the wild man 
know of it ; what can we yet know ? That it is a 
Force, and thousandfold complexity of Forces ; a 
Force which is not ive. That is aU ; it is not we, 
it is altogether different from us. Force, Force, 
everywhere Force ; we ourselves a mysterious Force 
in the centre of that. There is not a leaf rotting 
on the highway but has Force in it ; how else could 
it rot? Nay, surely, to the atheistic thinker, if 
such an one were possible, it must be a miracle 



8 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

too, this huge, illimitable whirlwind of force which 
envelops us here ; never resting whirlwind, high 
as Immensity, old as Eternity. What is it ? God's 
creation, the religious people answer; it is the 
Almighty God's. Atheistic science babbles poorly 
of it with scientific nomenclatures, experiments and 
what not ; as if it were a poor dead thing, to be 
bottled up in Ley den jars and sold over counters ; 
but the natural sense of man, in all times, if he 
will honestly apply his sense, proclaims it to be a 
living thing — ah, an unspeakable, godlike thing ; 
towards which the best attitude for us, after never 
so much science, is awe, devout prostration and 
humility of soul ; worship, if not in words, then in 
silence." ^ 

So much all serious minds must confess when 
some glimpses of the majesty and the wonder of 
this universe are vouchsafed them. Worship they 
must and will ; that impulse is human ; to stifle it 
is to belie our nature. 

But what is it that we worship ? Is it Force, 
indeed? Is there anything in any manifestation 
of physical energy that calls for the kind of feel- 
ing which we name worship ? There is energy in 
a grain of gunpowder, in a can of dynamite, in the 
steam rushing into the cylinder, in the current 
speeding from the dynamo ; is anything there that 
inspires a single throb of worshipful feeling ? 
Multiply force of this kind even to infinity; 
would it awaken in you any emotions of reveren- 
^ On Heroes, p. 242, Uniyersal Edition. 



BELIEF IN GOD 9 

tial love ? No ; I am sure that we are not and 
cannot be worshipers of mere force. 

Nor is The All of Things an object of worship. 
A mere aggregation does not awaken in us rever- 
ence. If things do not in themselves appeal to our 
veneration, no accumulation of them could do so. 
Quantity is not worshipful. Neither the addition 
table nor the multiplication table can be used to 
stimulate devotion. 

There are those who think that they reverence 
The All — who call themselves Pantheists ; but if 
they do so it is by investing The All with personal 
or spiritual qualities. Thus Strauss declares that 
he worships the Cosmos because " order and law, 
reason and goodness ^^^ are the soul of it. But how 
reason and goodness can exist apart from person- 
ality Strauss has never explained to us. 

Another very brave unbeliever confesses and 
maintains that those who have rejected the doc- 
trine of an intelligent and beneficent Creator of 
the world are obliged to hold on to the very same 
truth, under their belief in a " reasonable tendency 
in the universe," and their " faith in the reality of 
the good." Neither science nor virtue can exist, 
he says, unless we believe both these things : that 
the universe is reasonable, and that goodness is 
the fundamental reality. " Now is not this," he 
asks, "in essence just the same condition of life 
as that represented by the doctrine of the benefi- 
cent and intelligent Creator and Governor of the 
world ? " It is, I answer, the very same thing. 



10 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

For reasonableness and goodness are not physical 
but psychical qualities ; you cannot, if you try ever 
so hard, conceive of them as belonging to things or 
to systems of things ; they belong to persons ; and 
thus the fundamental assumption, on which all sci- 
ence and all morality rest, is identical with the old 
doctrine of God. 

The fundamental premise of science is that Na- 
ture is rational ; that every phenomenon admits of 
a rational explanation. That would seem to be 
only another way of saying that the Source of Na- 
ture is a Eeason akin to our own. The spread of 
knowledge must bring us into closer acquaintance 
with this eternal Eeason. 

The author of the Book of Daniel points onward 
to a day when many should run to and fro, and 
knowledge should be increased. We seem to be 
living in the morning of that day. The spread of 
intelligence upon the earth since the discovery of 
America and the invention of movable types is 
marvelous. Within the memory of most of us the 
opportunities of education have been greatly ex- 
tended. Multitudes who once did scarcely more 
than vegetate are now learning to think. It is a 
tremendous peril to which the world exposes itself 
when it sets so many people to thinking, but we 
have risked it and must make the best of it. The 
changes which are taking place in our beliefs about 
God are due to the fact that a great many people 
are thinking about things visible and invisible, 
trying to understand them and to make them agree 
with one another. 



BELIEF IN GOD 11 

Men have, indeed, always been thinking about 
the world in which they live ; they have known 
something, and have speculated much and won- 
dered more, about its physical features, its plains, 
mountains, rivers, seas, the clouds in its skies, the 
sun that lights it by day, and the moon and stars 
that are its lamps by night. The shepherd on the 
lonely Mesopotamian pastures, the sailor in his 
frail boat crossing the inland sea or coasting along 
the ocean's shore, had many thoughts about this 
world and its surroundings, about the shape and 
size of it, and the physical forces which bear rule 
upon it. But modern thought about the world is 
quite unlike that ancient w^ay of thinking. 

In the first place, modern thought apprehends, 
in some measure, the fact of a universe, which is a 
word the meaning of which none of the philoso- 
phers of ancient times could have comprehended. 
Our common apprehension of these things is one 
that would have overwhelmed wdth bewilderment 
and confusion Herodotus or Aristotle. The thought 
which was common to the great thinkers of the 
ancient time, and to the men w4io wrote the Bible, 
was that this earth was the central and stable plat- 
form of the Creation, above which various meteor- 
ological phenomena appeared, these being created 
and set in motion wholly for the service and con- 
venience of man. Dante's cosmogony was a sam- 
ple of the explanations which ancient thought had 
given to the phenomena of the earth and the hea- 
vens. " With the advent of the Copernican astron- 



12 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

orny," says Mr. Fiske, "tlie funnel-shaped Inferno, 
the steep mountain of Purgatory, crowned with its 
terrestrial paradise, and those concentric spheres 
of Heaven wherein beatified saints held weird and 
subtle converse, aU went their way to the limbo 
prepared for the childlike fancies of untaught 
minds, whither Hades and Valhalla had gone be- 
fore them. In our day it is hard to realize the 
startling effect of the discovery that man does not 
dwell at the centre of things, but is the denizen of 
an obscure and tiny speck of cosmical matter quite 
invisible amid the innumerable throng of flaming 
suns that make up our galaxy." ^ Modern thought 
about the extent and vastness of the universe in 
which we live thus seems to differ by the diameter 
of immensity from the thought of the olden time. 
The world in which the ancients supposed them- 
selves to be living, as compared with the universe 
in which we know ourselves to be living, was as a 
drop of water to the ocean. 

In the second place modern thought differs from 
the thought of a former time not less radically 
respecting the manner in which the universe has 
come into being. The older thought regarded cre- 
ation as a mechanical process ; things were made 
outright, as a watchmaker makes a watch. The 
Creator first called into being the matter of which 
the world is composed, and then took it and shaped 
it into the various forms which we now see about 
us; heaping up the mountains and scooping out 
^ The Destiny of Man, pp. 14, 15. 



BELIEF IN GOD 13 

the valleys by the fiat of his might; shaping the 
crystals by an act of volition ; creating, by the 
exertion of direct power, the manifold species of 
living things, just as they now exist, and endowing 
them with reproductive power, so that each should 
perpetuate its kind ; making, in the morning of the 
creation, the pine and the oak and the elm and 
the maple, the rose and the lily and the apple and 
the pear, and all the rest of the plants ; the horse 
and the ox and the elephant and the wolf and the 
zebra and the giraffe and the dog and the sheep, 
and all the rest of the mammals ; the eagle and the 
robin and the raven, and all the rest of the birds ; 
the pickerel and the trout and the minnow, and all 
the rest of the fishes ; the bee and the wasp and 
the butterfly, and all the rest of the insects ; mak- 
ing all the tribes of living creatures, just as we 
have them now, stocking the earth and the air and 
the waters with living inhabitants by one stu- 
pendous act of creative power ; so that there were 
just as many kinds, and just the same kinds, of 
living things upon the earth when the earth was a 
week old as there are to-day, — more, probably, for 
there are certainly some skeletons and fossils in 
our museums which represent races that are no 
longer in existence. This is, for substance, the 
thought about the manner in which the world and 
its inhabitants came into being which was enter- 
tained by thinkers and philosophers until a very 
recent date. The modern world is not thinking 
along this line respecting the origin of the world 



14 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

and the life upon its surface. The beliefs about 
the method of creation which were held when I 
was a boy by nearly all intelligent men are not 
held to-day by any intelligent man. It is now 
known as well as anything can be known that the 
earth assumed its present form as the result of 
forces acting through long aeons, whose action we 
can observe and measure ; how the rocks were 
formed, how the mountains were heaped up, how 
the valleys were scooped out, we know as well as 
we know how the Brooklyn Bridge was built ; and 
we know that the work was going on for hundreds 
of thousands of years. We know that the various 
tribes of life have passed through many changes of 
form and function ; that for ages on ages, these 
changes have been going on, the forms of life 
gradually rising from the lower to the higher. The 
record is written in the rocks, and no man of intel- 
ligence can contradict it. The progress of life is 
from the simple to the complex, from the more 
generalized to the more specific ; and there is 
plenty of evidence of the transformation of one 
species into another. This is the way things have 
come to be what they are ; they are linked together 
genetically; what has taken place in nature was 
not the offhand manufacture of all created things, 
but their gradual becoming. 

This way of thinking about things has become 
very nearly universal. We all assume, whenever 
we begin to study any subject in science, in history, 
in archaeology, in sociology, that one thing natu- 



BELIEF IN GOD 15 

rally grows out of anotlier ; that the life of one 
generation is closely connected with the life of the 
generations that have preceded it ; that languages, 
customs, laws, institutions, are products of develop- 
ment. It is this mighty thought about the genetic 
relations of things that has taken possession of the 
mind of the world. It is before this thousfht that 
the modern Christian is standing, — in a rather 
solicitous state of mind. What can he do with it ? 
Does it not contradict many of the doctrines which 
he has regarded as essential to faith ? Does it not 
assail the authority of the Bible ? Does it not 
overthrow the entire Christian system ? So some 
people are telling him, — some, I regret to say, 
who ought to be in better business. And it is true 
that if the authority of the Bible stands or falls 
with its scientific inerrancy, then the Bible can no 
longer be regarded as authority ; and that if to be 
a Christian it is necessary to believe that the world 
and all thinsfs therein were created out of nothino^ 
and given their present forms in 144 hours, no 
intelligent man can be a Christian any longer. 

But I, for one, am going, in spite of both Mr. 
Ino-ersoll and Mr. Moodv, to believe a little lousier 
yet that the Bible is worth a great deal to man- 
kind, after you have fully recognized the fact that 
it is not an authority in geology and astronomy ; 
and that one may be a Christian without denying 
any of the well established facts of modern science. 
I am going to maintain that the intelligent Chris- 
tian may stand in the presence of modern thought, 



16 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

and accept everything that has been proved by- 
science or history or criticism, and not be fright- 
ened at all by any of it ; firmly believing that the 
great verities of the Christian faith will still re- 
main untouched. 

There are those to whom the doctrine of Evolu- 
tion seems atheistic ; they think that it banishes 
God from the universe. But the atheism is not in 
evolution ; it is in the man who insists on putting 
an atheistic interpretation upon it. The fool can 
always say in his heart, " There is no God ; " he said 
it long before Darwin ; he said it with a persistent 
emphasis in the days when the old deistic concep- 
tion was current of a God who manufactured a 
universe out of hand and stocked it with forces 
and wound it up and set it running, — in the days 
when the conception of an orderly progress in the 
creation had scarcely dawned upon the human 
mind. It may be that some people can more easily 
believe in a God who only now and then visits this 
world to interfere in a miraculous way with the 
working of the laws which he has ordained; for 
myself I find it easier to believe in one who is 
present in all the forces of nature, revealing him- 
self not so convincingly by occasional interruptions 
of the order as by the order itself. 

The truth is that modern thought is conducting 
us to a belief in God which comes far nearer to 
knowledge of him than any of the intellectual pro- 
cesses of the past ever carried us ; and that it is 
along the paths which Evolution has opened to us 



BELIEF IN GOD 17 

that we are drawing near to God. The first dis- 
cussions of this doctrine excited much alarm ; it 
seemed to many that it banished God from his uni- 
verse. The fear was puerile. The child who looks 
upon an automatic toy may imagine that it is self- 
moved,; the mature mind knows that there is a 
hidden force that moves it. Mr. Darwin's theory 
of the origin of species was an explanation of the 
method of creation ; it did not attempt to account 
for the existence of those primal forces and ten- 
dencies under whose action and interaction this 
work of development went on. Under that theory 
it was still necessary to say, " In the beginning, 
God." The last words of this first great treatise, 
" The Origin of Species,*' must not be forgotten : 
" There is grandeur in this view of life, with its 
several powers, having been originally breathed by 
the Creator into a few forms or into one ; and that 
while this planet has gone cycling on according to 
the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a begin- 
ning endless forms most beautiful and most won- 
derful have been and are being evolved." 

It is true, however, that while students have 
been busy upon the minutiae of evolution — study- 
ing fishes' fins and birds' wings and horses' toes — 
the larger implications of the subject have been 
much neglected ; and there have been a good many 
among them who could not see the woods for the 
trees. Specialization is apt to develop a provin- 
cial mind ; the specialist knows his own province, 
but is skeptical about the existence of others, and 



18 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

has no knowledge of larger relations. But since 
the appearance of Mr. Darwin's essay time enough 
has now elapsed to enable some of the philosophers 
of evolution to take a comprehensive view of all 
the facts; and as the returns begin to come in 
from the whole field, some things plainly appear 
which at first were dimly seen. 

It would be interesting, if there were time, to 
glance at some of the conclusions with reference to 
the truth of theism which have been reached in 
recent years, by eminent scientific men who are 
not theologians, and who have approached the sub- 
ject from the scientific side. 

One of the most striking of these testimonies 
was that of George John Romanes, the eminent 
psychologist and zo'ologist, whose book, written 
twenty years ago, and entitled " A Candid Exami- 
nation of Theism by Physicus," is the strongest 
attack that I have ever read upon the ordinary 
proofs _ of the divine existence. Mr. Romanes, 
much against his own inclination, had convinced, 
himself that the evolutionary doctrines had demol- 
ished all those proofs, and in a most pathetic con- 
fession he declared that the faith in which his soul 
had reposed from his childhood was gone forever. 
But Mr. Romanes kept thinking, and, gradually, 
some of the larger implications of the subject be- 
gan to appear to him. He was compelled to revise 
the arguments by which he had, as he supposed, 
demolished theism, and at length to acknowledge 
that they were fallacious, and that evolution had 



BELIEF IN GOD 19 

strengthened rather than weakened our reasons for 
believing in God. 

Our own John Fiske was regarded by Mr. Dar- 
win as the ablest exponent of evolution upon this 
continent. Mr. Darwin paid Mr. Fiske the com- 
pliment of saying that he was the clearest writer 
on philosophical subjects that he had ever read. 
In the earlier years of his evolutionary studies Mr. 
Fiske was reserved in the expression of his opin- 
ions respecting the theological bearings of evolu- 
tion. But in recent years, since he has had time 
to assemble and organize the results of his inves- 
tigations, his utterances have been increasing in 
clearness and positiveness. Those two little books, 
" The Destiny of Man " and " The Idea of God," 
have been a veritable evangel to many groping 
minds. And that other small volume, lately pub- 
lished, " Through Nature to God," is much more 
important than anything he has hitherto said. 

In the report which I am now trying to bring to 
you upon the latest phases of theism, I can do 
you no greater service than to give you, briefly, 
and largely in my own words, an outline of the 
argument of the concluding essay of this book on 
" The Everlasting Reality of Religion." 

The argument starts with the Spencerian defini- 
tion of life as " the continuous adjustment of inner 
relations to outer relations." " The most funda- 
mental characteristic of living things," says Mr. 
Fiske, "is their response to external stimuli. If 
you come upon a dog lying by the roadside and 



20 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

are in doubt whether he is alive, you poke him with 
a stick. If you get no response, you presently 
think that it is a dead dog. So, if a tree fails to 
put forth leaves it is an indication of death. Pour 
water on a drooping plant and it shows its life by 
rearing its head ; this is the result of a continuous 
adjustment of relations within the plant to relations 
existing outside of it. . . . All life upon the globe, 
whether physical or psychical, represents continued 
adjustment of inner to outer relations." ^ ' 

The lungs and the atmosphere are fitted for 
each other ; the stimulus of the vital air from with- 
out, received by the lungs within, is the momen- 
tary and constant condition of life. The food of 
the gardens and the fields is adapted to our diges- 
tive organs, and our organs are adjusted to the 
stimulus of the food, and the adjustment must be 
continuous. A striking instance of this biological 
adjustment is the evolution of the eye. In Mr. 
Fiske's words, " there was first a concentration of 
pigment grains in a particular dermal sac, making 
that spot particularly sensitive to the light ; then 
came, by slow degrees, the heightened translucence, 
the convexity of surface, the refracting humors, and 
the multiplication of nerve vesicles arranging them- 
selves as retinal rods. And what was the result 
of all this for the creature in whom organs of vision 
were thus developed ? There was an immense ex- 
tension of the range, complexity, and definiteness 
of the adjustment of inner relations to outer rela- 
1 Through Nature to God, pp. 178-180. 



BELIEF IN GOD 21 

tlons. In other words there was an immense in- 
crease of life. Then came into existence, more- 
over, for those with eyes to see it, a mighty visible 
world that for sightless creatures had been virtually 
non-existent." ^ 

The organs of touch and taste and hearing have 
been developed in precisely the same way. In all 
these cases we clearly see how the forms of the life 
within have been shaped to receive the gifts of the 
world without. The evolution of the eye, as we 
see it going on, is a process of preparation for the 
great revelation that is to be made, by and by, of 
the visual glory of the universe. It is because 
there are waiting outside skies and fields and flow- 
ers and gems, wonders of form and color, faces 
beautiful with the light of a deathless love, that 
the eye is slowly rounded into form. It is be- 
cause the sound of many waters, and the caroling 
of birds, and the music of mighty symphonies, and 
the thrilling tones of loving voices are seeking to 
reveal themselves to the waiting soul, that the ear 
is formed for hearing. Nay, it is in and by the 
very action of the elements without that these fac- 
ulties within are summoned into being. It is the 
light softly playing on those sensitive pigments 
that assembles the tissues by which the eye is 
formed. It is by the waves of sound gently beat- 
ing upon the rudimentary ear, and saying, " Let 
us come in, and bring our music with us ! " that 
the ear has been created. The age-long process by 

1 Through Nature to God, p. 184, 



22 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

which each of these organs has been shaped is a 
clear witness to the reality of some wondrous gift 
that is coming into the life by means of it. We 
know when we see such an organ growing that 
there is some precious commerce on the ocean of 
existence for which it is to be the port of entry. 
The existence of such an organ or faculty is the 
sien of some vital correlation between the life 
within and the world without. 

Take this fundamental law of the evolution of 
life, and apply it to the life of humanity. From 
the dawn of love in human life, the impulse to wor- 
ship, to pray, to believe in an unseen world has 
found constant expression. Eeligion is one of the 
great factors of human history. And the religious 
life of the race, Mr. Fiske tells us, has always in- 
volved these three elements : belief in a quasi- 
human God, in a future life, and in some relation 
between conduct here and happiness Hereafter. By 
a quasi-human God is meant a God between whom 
and ourselves there can be relations of knowledge 
and affection ; whose kinsmen we are ; who knows 
us and loves us. " As a matter of history," says 
Mr, Fiske, " the existence of a quasi-human God 
has always been an assumption, or postulate. It is 
something which men have all along taken for 
granted. It probably never occurred to any one to 
try to prove the existence of such a God until it 
was doubted ; and doubts on that subject are very 
modern. Omitting from the count a few score in- 
genious philosophers, it may be said that aU man- 



BELIEF IX GOD 23 

kind — the wisest and the simplest — have taken 
for granted the existence of a Deity, or deities, of 
a psychical nature more or less similar to that of 
humanity. . . . Such a postulate has formed a part 
of all human thinking from primitive ages down to 
the present time." ^ 

Here, then, is the fact of religion. And what 
are the dimensions of this fact? "Xone can deny," 
says Mr. Fiske, " that it is the largest and most 
ubiquitous , fact connected with the existence of 
mankind upon the earth." ^ The greatest fact of 
human history — the most influential fact — is 
this universal belief in an unseen world and in a 
God who is the Father of our spirits. It is this 
fact, ivMch evolution, through countless ages, has 
been producing . The same process of development 
by which the eye and the ear were formed has 
evolved this universal human tendency to reach 
out toward an unseen world, to feel after God. if 
haply we may find him. 

If, now% this universal hunger for a God whom 
we can know and love, this hunger which evolu- 
tion has taken so many centuries to develop, is a 
huno^er which there is nothino^ in the universe to 
satisfy; if the spiritual eye has been developed, 
through ages of human experience, that it may 
gaze upon vacancy, fixing its piteous appeal upon 
the blackness of darkness forever, then all that is 
fundamental in the philosophy of evolution is dis- 
credited and set at naught. 

1 Through Nature to God, pp. 163, 164. 2 Xbi^^ p. 159. 



24 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

" If the relation thus established," says Mr. 
Fiske, "in the morning twilight of Man's existence, 
between the Human Soul and a world invisible and 
immaterial, is a relation of which only the subjec- 
tive term is real and the objective term is non- 
existent, then I say it is something utterly without 
precedent in the whole history of creation. All 
the analogies of evolution, so far as we have been 
able to decipher it, are overwhelming against any 
such supposition. . . . All the analogies of nature 
fairly shout against the assumption of such a 
breach of continuity between the evolution of man 
and all previous evolution. So far as our know- 
ledge of nature goes, the whole momentum of it 
carries us onward to the conclusion that the Un- 
seen World as the objective term in a relation of 
fundamental importance that has coexisted with 
the whole career of Mankind, has a real existence ; 
and it is but following out the analogy to regard 
the unseen world as the theatre where the ethical 
process is destined to reach its full consumma- 
tion." 1 

These final words of this strong thinker put to 
silence, as with the blast of a mighty trumpet, the 
small cavils of a generation of sciolists : — 

" The lesson of evolution is that through all 
these weary ages the human soul has not been 
cherishing in Religion a delusive phantom ; but, in 
spite of seemingly endless groping and stumbling, 
it has been rising to the recognition of its essential 

1 Page 91. 



BELIEF IN GOD 25 

kinship with the ever-living God. Of all the im- 
plications of the doctrine of evolution with regard 
to Man, I believe the very deepest and strongest 
to be that which asserts the everlasting reality of 
religion." ^ 

Here we may rest our argument. I am sure 
that we have found some reason for believing that 
whatever may have happened to the other doctrines 
of religion, the foundation of it all standeth sure. 

Have there been no changes, then, in our doc- 
trine of God ? Yes, there have been many changes. 

In the first place, the arguments which men used 
to employ to prove the existence of God are not 
now relied on so much as they used to be ; science 
has greatly weakened the force of some of them ; 
but it has given us in their stead that broader 
argument which we have just been considering. 

In the second place, our view of the character of 
God has greatly changed. We do not think and 
say the same things about Him that we used to 
think and say. We do not try to explain all his 
thoughts and feelings and purposes so much as we 
used to do. We have more perfectly learned what 
the Psalmist meant when he said, " Clouds and 
darkness are round about Him." We know that 
Infinite Being must contain depths that the plum- 
met of our understanding cannot fathom. 

One hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, 
men had very definite statements to make about 
God's moral government. They thought that they 
understood it all perfectly ; they seemed to think 

1 Page 191. 



26 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

that it was substantially like one of our political 
governments, and was founded on just the same 
kind of expediencies as those on which our govern- 
ments rest. What would be politic for an earthly 
ruler, they argued, God must do. Out of that 
conception a great many notions sprung which 
were altogether crude and unworthy. The doc- 
trines of retribution, the doctrines of forgiveness, 
which rested on this forensic conception, have 
largely passed away. 

But while many of the childish and inadequate 
notions about God are disappearing from human 
thought, belief in Him as our Heavenly Father, 
as the Infinite Love which is behind all law, has 
not been shaken in the minds of reasonable men. 
There never was an hour when so many men could 
say from the heart, " I believe in God, the Father 
Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth ; " there 
was never an hour when this belief was bulwarked 
by such an accumulation of scientific knowledge. 
It is a very shallow philosophy which imagines that 
the one subject in which human beings have al- 
ways been more deeply interested than in any other 
can be dismissed, as mere superstition, by the wave 
of an orator's hand ; or that men are likely, very 
soon, in the presence of this majestic universe, to 
cease to wonder or to worship before the Power 
that has called it into existence. For one, I firmly 
believe that modern thought is laboriously build- 
ing up a foundation for our faith far more firm 
and broad than that on which men rested their souls 
in what were known as the ages of faith. 



BELIEF IN GOD 27 

The arguments which men were using fifty years 
ago to prove the existence of God all embodied 
profound truth, but in the light of modern science 
they need restatement. In an ordaining council 
I once heard the question put to a young man 
whose mind was alive with the movement of the 
time, what he thought about Paley's argument for 
theism. " Oh, it was all very well for its day," 
he answered ; " it called attention to some indica- 
tions of purpose in the creation ; but the proofs of 
purpose which have been shown us since by such 
writers as Darwin and Tyndal, and Huxley throw 
all that exhibit into the shade." The venerable 
examiners looked at one another in blank amaze- 
ment. They understood not the saying, but the 
candidate had told them the exact truth. The tele- 
ology of modern science is far more cogent than 
that of Paley's generation. 

It may be doubted whether we shall ever have 
scientific demonstration of the existence of God. 
God is a spirit, and our deepest knowledge of Him 
must be spiritual rather than scientific. But the 
more complete is our scientific knowledge the 
stronger will be the probability of the existence of 
God. Surely if God is in his world, He must be 
revealing himself to us in all its laws and forces, 
and therefore all ordered knowledge of the world 
must be bringing Him nearer to our thought, and 
every science must be tributary to that great uni- 
fying revelation wherein faith and knowledge are 
no longer twain, but one. 



II 

HOW THE WORLDS WERE MADE 

In the preceding chapter we considered the rela- 
tion of Evolution to the belief in God, showing how 
the old theistic arguments have been modified and 
strengthened by the discovery that creation is the 
result, not of an instantaneous fiat, but of a contin- 
uous process. Inasmuch as the changes which have 
taken place within the past fifty years in our theo- 
logical statements have mainly resulted from the 
prevalence of evolutionary theories, it may be well 
to examine a little more fully the significance of 
the doctrine of Evolution. In the first chapter of 
John's Gospel we find a doctrine of origins whose 
philosophy is not yet antiquated : "In the begin- 
ning was the Word, and the Word was with God, 
and the Word was God. The same was in the 
beginning with God. All things were made 
through him, and without him was not anything 
made that hath been made." " Word " in the 
Greek is Logos ; it has a double signification : it 
means both thought and expression, the idea and 
its symbol. The Greeks, therefore, came to use 
Logos as primarily denoting the eternal Reason, 
and secondarily the utterance or manifestation of 



HOW THE WORLDS WERE MADE 29 

that Reason. Of course thought must exist before 
expression. When, therefore, we are told that in 
the beginning was the Word, the truth is brought 
before us that the universe originated in thought ; 
that the foundation of it all is in the eternal Rea- 
son. And this is the constant assumption of modern 
science. Science could not proceed a single step 
but for the belief that that which it is investio:atin2: 
is intelligible ; that it is possible to understand it ; 
that it is grounded upon reason ; that an intelli- 
gence, similar to our intelligence, has established 
the order and law which it expects to find in 
every process. The universe is reasonable ; it is 
in harmony with reason ; it can be made intelligi- 
ble to reason ; it must have originated in the eternal 
Reason. This, I say, is the fundamental postulate 
of all scientific investigation ; any scientific man 
stultifies himself if he denies it ; it is no more pos- 
sible to get away from it than it is to get away 
from your shadow ; and the whole mighty accumu- 
lation of scientific knowledge is one harmonious 
and unanimous testimony to the truth that the uni- 
verse is intelligible. How it could be intelligible 
if it had not originated in Intelligence I defy any 
man to explain. 

If, therefore, any one supposes that evolution 
has undermined the doctrine of an intelligent Au- 
thor of the Universe, he cannot too soon rid him- 
self of that notion. There are those, no doubt, 
who imagine that evolution has somehow supplanted 
God ; that there is some kind of an abstraction or 



30 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

apparatus called evolution, which has neither mind 
nor will, which originated planlessly, which works 
on in an haphazard way, and which by an infinite 
series of hits and misses has brought forth the uni- 
verse as it now exists. There are scientific men 
with an anti-theological bias so strong that they 
are often inclined to use language which squints in 
this atheistic direction. But sound thinking gives 
no room, for any such conceptions. As I have said 
in the preceding chapter, there never was a time 
when the belief in creative intelligence had so 
much proof to support it as it has to-day. The 
doctrine of evolution, instead of weakening the 
faith in God of all those who have studied it pro- 
foundly, has given to many of them their strongest 
reasons for believing in an all-wise God. 

What, then, is the doctrine of evolution ? The 
word signifies unfolding, or opening out. The un- 
rolling of a map is an evolution. The opening of 
a flower bud is an evolution. The term would 
therefore itself appear to suggest some previous 
process of thought or activity. What is unfolded 
must first have been enfolded ; what is unrolled 
must first have been rolled. Evolution implies in- 
volution. The process which we are watching must 
have been prepared for beforehand. But without 
putting any stress on this mere verbal argument, 
let us ask what evolution means in the large sense 
of the word, — the sense in which it is most fre- 
quently used. 

" To the scientific world," says the professor of 



HOW THE WORLDS WERE MADE 31 

biology in Wooster University, " evolution is a uni- 
versal law of nature, whereby the existing order of 
things in the visible universe as viewed by man, 
including man himself, has come into its present 
state of existence through the interaction of certain 
forces operating in the direction of a progressive 
change from some unknown primitive condition of 
things. To the Christian the same thought might 
be expressed by saying that evolution is the divine 
mode of creation, whereby God has wrought out 
the existing order of things through the continu- 
ous operation of his creative power." These two 
dejfinitions, as I understand them, are only different 
ways of expressing the same truth. 

The real question is whether the world as we see 
it to-day, with the different kinds of animals and 
plants upon, it was created in the beginning just as 
it now is, or substantially as it now is, making 
allowance for such changes as man himself has 
wrought ; or whether only a few forms of life were 
originally created, and whether these forms, by 
virtue of the forces with which they were endowed, 
and by their action upon one another, and the 
reaction of their environment upon them, have 
brought forth, in a long series of gTadual changes, 
the multitudinous forms of life that now appear. 
Was it true that in the morning of the creation, 
when the world came forth from the fiat of the 
Creator, the same plants and the same animals 
existed upon the earth as those which now exist ; 
that the pine and the oak and the beech and the 



32 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

birch and the rose and the myrtle and the daisy 
and the goldenrod and the wheat and the maize 
and all the rest of the plants which we now have 
were then in the Garden of Eden ; and that the 
animals which we now know, or at least the wild 
animals and birds and fishes and insects, were of 
the same orders and species as those which now 
exist upon the earth ? Gr, if perchance the exist- 
ing kinds of plants and animals were not all 
created then, in their present forms, have they 
been created outright since, in successive periods, 
and placed upon the earth ? 

In answering this question one or two facts come 
at once into clear light. It is certain that the 
earth itself is a very different planet from what 
it was in the beginning. Evidences of changes, 
mighty changes, through which it has been passing, 
abound on every hand. I presume that there are 
still many persons who are in the habit of conceiv- 
ing that the world as we see it to-day is substan- 
tially the same as it has always been ; that the Crea- 
tor, at the beginning, mapped out the continents 
and the oceans and the gulfs and the straits and 
the islands ; that it was the Creator's finger that 
literally drew the course of the Euphrates and the 
Nile and the Amazon and the Mississippi, from 
their sources to the sea ; that it was the Creator's 
hand that heaped up the mountains and the little 
hills and scooped out the valleys ; that laid the 
masonry of the gigantic cliffs of the Yosemite and 
the Lauterbrunnen Thai; that manufactured the 



HOW THE WORLDS WERE MADE 33 

coal and stowed it away under the hills of the 
Hocking valley and the Appalachian chain. Of 
course it is true that all this has been done by the 
Creator's power ; but the notion to which I refer 
is that these features of the earth took their pre- 
sent form as the immediate result of a creative 
fiat. And I dare say that there are many good 
people to whom the denial of this theory would 
seem a dangerous kind of skepticism. But it is 
certainly a fact which no fairly intelligent person 
can question that the present form of the earth is 
the result of a long series of physical changes. 
" It probably existed," says the professor whom I 
have already quoted, " for millions of years as a 
separate planet, before water condensed upon its 
surface, and it is clearly demonstrated that it has 
existed for other millions of years since that time. 
During this period there has been in operation 
a constant process of progressive change, whereby, 
through the operation of natural agencies, such as 
water, atmosphere, heat and cold, and chemical 
affinity, the surface of the earth has been differen- 
tiated from a barren expanse of uniform character 
to the present varied features of land and water, 
continents and islands, lakes and rivers, forests 
and prairies, and beneath the surface, rocks and 
metals, coal and gas, and so on throughout the 
long list of natural products fitted for the use of 
man, — one of the most striking evidences of har- 
monious design, and yet so conclusively shown to 
have come into its present form through the opera- 



34 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

tion of the law of progressive change that no intel- 
ligent person would venture to affirm that it was 
all created by an omnipotent fiat in the form in 
which we now find it. The very agencies that 
have wrought it all out may be readily observed 
to-day under our very eyes continuing the process. 
If any one doubts, for example, that the coal beds 
represent a gradual accumulation of vegetation, let 
him go to the mouth of the Mississippi and see the 
process in operation. If any one doubts that such 
vast accumulations of rock as the Trenton lime- 
stone under our very feet have been built up from 
the secretions of aniuial life, involving necessarily 
an untold lapse of time, let him go to the islands 
of the Pacific and examine the process where it is 
now open to his observation. In short, any one 
who studies carefully and in detail the teachings 
of geology must be convinced that the earth has 
come into its present condition through a gradual 
process of progressive changes ; in other words, 
that it has been created by evolution, from a rela- 
tively primitive condition." 

That the world itself was made in this way we 
do positively know ; does not this furnish us some 
pretty good reasons for believing that the tribes 
which inhabit the earth have come into being in 
the same way ? When we find such a stupendous 
illustration as this of the Creator's method, is it not 
reasonable to suppose that all his work of creation 
is done upon the same plan ? 

But the earth itself contains, in the close-locked 



HOW THE WORLDS WERE MADE 35 

archives of its rocky crust, other and even more 
conchisive evidences. I said that the question 
before us really is whether the species now exist- 
ing were created, in their present forms, in the 
beginning. That, as I well remember, was the 
view which was presented to me in my boyhood ; I 
learned to believe that all the living things round 
about me were called into existence by the fiat of 
the Creator, in their present forms ; and that every 
form of life to which existence was given in the 
birth-morning of the creation was still li\'ing upon 
the earth. But the record in the rocks makes it 
plain that thousands upon thousands of species 
once existed which no longer exist, and gives us 
the strono^est reasons for believino' that most of the 
forms now existing are of comparatively recent 
origin. It is as plain as anything can be that con- 
stant changes in the forms of living beings have 
been taking place through all the age-long record 
of the earth. And it is easy for us to trace the 
history of some, at least, of the forms now existing, 
and to show how they have been modified from age 
to age. The fossil remains of plants and animals 
in the rocks exhibit to us, as Professor Mateer has 
told us, the following facts : — 

" 1. The species of animals and plants now 
living have only existed upon the earth for a com- 
paratively short time, geologically speaking. 

" 2. While the earliest records of life upon the 
earth have probably all been obliterated, yet the 
earliest that have been preserved in fossil remains 



36 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

are all lower in grade of organization than their 
related forms now living. 

" 3. There has gradually taken place all through 
the geological ages a constant extinction of old 
species and a constant appearance of new. 

" 4. The new species thus constantly appearing 
usually mark an advance over the older species 
preceding them. 

" These are the facts. What is their signifi- 
cance ? They indicate a progressive change, and 
therefore suggest the presence of an organic evolu- 
tion." 

The cumulative proof of this great process is, of 
course, too vast to be even hinted at in this brief 
discourse. Not only the fossils in the rocks, but 
the distribution of living species over the earth 
gives evidence of this, and comparative anatomy, 
which shows us the close resemblances of living 
creatures, and the minute gradations by which dif- 
ferent species shade into each other, indicating 
that the higher may have grown out of the lower, 
adds its testimony. Most striking of all is the evi- 
dence from embryology, in that prenatal history 
of man of which the Psalmist knew very little, but 
of which he spoke very reverently, as we all ought 
to speak : — 

" I will give thanks unto Thee, for I am fearfully and won- 
derfully made. 

Wonderful are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right 
well. 

My frame was not hidden from thee 



HOW THE WORLDS WERE MADE 37 

When I was made in secret 

And curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. 

Thine eyes did see my imperfect substance, 

And in thy book were all my members written, 

Which day by day were fashioned 

When as yet there was none of them." 

Every living creature, from the lowest to the 
highest, begins its existence as a single, undiffer- 
entiated cell. The mighty elm, whose branches 
shadow an acre, was at first only a little winged 
seed, a single germ, which fell into the ground, and 
then began the process of evolution which brought 
forth the majestic tree. The stateliest and the most 
powerful of the animals was, in the beginning, a 
single undifferentiated cell, and the same thing 
is equally true of man. Says Professor Drum- 
mond : — 

" The embryo of the future man begins life, like 
the primitive savage, in a one-roomed hut, a single 
simple cell. This cell is round and nearly micro- 
scopic in size. When fully formed it measures 
only one tenth of a line in diameter, and with the 
naked eye can be discerned as a very fine point. 
An outer covering, transparent as glass, surrounds 
this little sphere, and in the interior, embedded in 
protoplasm, lies a bright globular spot. In form, 
in size, in composition, there is no apparent differ- 
ence between this human cell and that of any 
other mammal. The dog, the elephant, the lion, 
the ape, and a thousand others begin their widely 
different lives in a house the same as man's. At 



3S WHAT IS L£FT OF THE OLD DOCTKTXES ? 

an earlier stage, indeed, before it has taken on its 
pellucid coveriDg. this cell has afl&nities still more 
astonishing. For at that remote period the earlier 
forms of all living things, both plant and animal, 
are one. It is one of the most astounding facts of 
modem science that the first embryonic abodes of 
moss and fern and pine, of shark and crab and 
coral polyp, of lizard, leopard, monkey, and man 
are so exactly similar that the highest powers of 
mind and microscope fail to trace the smallest dis- 
tinction between them." ^ 

But the most astonishing fact is that each of 
these forms of animal life, as it is developed from 
the cell, takes on, one after another, the different 
forms of the lower orders. There are stages in 
the dcTelopment of a man when he cannot be dis- 
tinguished from a worm, other stages when his 
structure is identical with that of the fish : others 
when you cannot distinguish him from a reptile 
like the frog, others when he takes the form of a 
bird, and so on ; in the rapidly passing stages of 
his earlier history he is identified in shape, and 
apparently in substance, with one after another of 
his humbler fellow creatures. *' In man, as in the 
fish," says Professor Kingsley, ** the heart is at 
first two-chambered : then it becomes three-cham- 
bered, as in the lower reptiles, and later it devel- 
ops the four-chambered condition, which it retains 
through life. In the blood vessels are the same 
gUl arteries as in the frog or shark, running in the 
1 21c AsceM of Man. p. 62. 



HOW THE WORLDS WERE MADE 39 

same direction and uniting to form the same dorsal 
aorta. There is the same tendency to form gill 
slits upon the side of the neck, and in exactly the 
same manner, as outgrowths from the throat to- 
ward the external skin. Later the blood vessels 
change ; the gill slits close up, all except the first, 
which persists as the Eustachian tube, connecting 
the throat with the inner ear. After a time the 
distinctively mammalian features become more 
prominent, and then comes a time when no one can 
decide between two embryos which is that of a dog 
and which that of man. Later the two can be dis- 
tinguished, but still that of man and that of a mon- 
key show no differences, that of man presents so 
many monkey-like features." ^ These facts of the 
embryonic history of man are as well established 
as any facts in science. And when we consider 
them well, and couple them with what we know of 
the slow and gradual processes by which the earth 
has been formed, and with what we have learned 
from the fossils in the rocks respecting the pro- 
gressive changes in the tribes of living creatures, it 
certainly does not seem incredible that the method 
of creation has been the method of evolution ; that 
the different orders of living beings are genetically 
related; that the higher have sprung from the 
lower ; that all things that have life are our fellow 
creatures by the strongest of all bonds. 

There are very few geologists, and still fewer 
biologists, who to-day dispute this great fact of 

^ Johnson's Ci/cloptedia, art. "Evolution." 



40 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTKINES ? 

evolution. There are a few, but they do not re- 
present the great body of scientific students. In 
truth this conception, that all things " consist," to 
use Paul's phrase, that the present is the child of 
the past, that genetic relations are to be looked for 
everywhere, has come to rule all our thinking ; the 
evolutionary idea, the evolutionary logic, finds ex- 
pression in all our serious conversation ; we are all 
evolutionists in the habit of our minds, even when 
we are not aware of it. " Great scientific discov- 
eries," says a very orthodox theologian, " are not 
merely new facts to be assimilated ; they involve 
new ways of looking at things. And this has been 
primarily the case with the law of evolution, 
which, once observed, has rapidly extended to 
every department of thought and history, and 
altered our attitude towards all knowledge. Or- 
ganisms, nations, languages, institutions, customs, 
creeds, have all come to be regarded in the light of 
their development, and we feel that to understand 
what a thing really is, we must examine how it 
came to be. Evolution is in the air. It is the 
category of the age ; a ' partus temporig,' a neces- 
sary consequence of our wider field of comparison. 
We cannot place ourselves outside it, or limit the 
scope of its operation." ^ 

The question about evolution which has been 

most hotly disputed respects not the fact, but the 

mode. Mr. Darwin undertook to show us not only 

that it is in progress, but how it goes forward, 

^ J. R. lUingworth, in Lux Mundi, p. 151. 



HOW THE WORLDS WERE MADE 41 

what is the law of its operation. His theory of 
natural selection, which I cannot now stop to ex- 
plain, has been challenged by many naturalists. 
Undoubtedly it explains much ; but it does not 
explain everything. And when the scientific peo- 
ple undertake to tell us what it is that has wrought 
all these wonders, and precisely how it works, they 
sometimes get beyond their depth. There is very 
likely to be more in earth, as well as in heaven, 
than their philosophy finds room for. They do 
not succeed in explaining the beginnings of life ; 
the wisest of them do not try. Mr. Darwin as- 
sumes that life was here, in the world, in a few 
simple forms, at the beginning ; he assumes that 
the Creator breathed life into these forms ; he only 
tries to show how the life thus originated has been 
multiplied and modified. Respecting this process 
there is much that we do not know. But one or 
two things seem to be evident. 

The first is that these original germs, out of 
which so much has come, must have been endowed 
with wonderful potencies and powers. When we 
see what a marvel of majesty and beauty can come 
forth from the minute germ of the acorn or the 
maple seed, we get a slight impression of the poten- 
tialities of life. The evolution reveals the miracle 
of the involution. Creation is far more wonderful 
when we think of all this manifold life of the world 
as having been originally packed away in a few 
simple forms, to be drawn forth thence in the slow 
progress of the ages, than when we imagine each of 



42 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

the forms we know as having been bidden into 
existence by an infinite fiat. 

But there is something more in this process than 
the potentialities that the germs contain. The 
forces of life are there in the germs ; but all theo- 
ries of evolution agree that the changes which 
take place in them are largel}^ influenced by the 
environment. It is what surrounds these growing 
things and acts upon them that largely shapes 
their development. It is this feature of the evo- 
lutionary doctrine which has been regarded, I sup- 
pose, as especially materialistic and dangerous. 
If the action and reaction of the environment 
upon the life accounted for nearly everything, 
there seemed to be little room left for a control- 
ling purpose. But a deeper thought disposes of 
this misgiving. What is this environment ? What 
is the one word that describes this all encompass- 
ing Power which encircles every living thing ? We 
say that it is Nature, but it is truer to say that it 
is God. It is a natural world, in every force of 
which God is immanent. He who endowed these 
germs with their marvelous potencies surrounds 
them also with an environment in every part of 
which He is always present. It is this idea of an 
immanent God which makes the doctrine of evo- 
lution not only rational, but sublimely religious. 
And it is modern science which has forced upon 
us this conception. " The one absolutely impossi- 
ble conception of God in the present day," says a 
modern theologian, " is that which represents Him 



HOW THE WORLDS WERE MADE 43 

as an occasional visitor. Science had pushed the 
deist's God farther and farther away, and at the 
moment when it seemed that He would be thrust 
out altogether, Darwinism appeared, and, under 
the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend. It 
has conferred upon philosophy and religion an 
inestimable benefit by showing us that we must 
choose between two alternatives. Either God is 
everywhere present in nature, or He is nowhere. 
He cannot be here and not there. He cannot del- 
egate his power to demigods called ' second causes.' 
In nature everything must be his work or nothing. 
We must frankly return to the Christian view of 
direct divine agency, the immanence of divine 
power in nature from end to end, the belief^ in a 
God in whom not only we, but all things have their 
being, or we must banish Him altogether. It seems 
as if, in the providence of God, the mission of 
modern science was to bring home to our unmeta- 
physical ways of thinking the great truth of the 
divine immanence in creation, which is not less 
essential to the Christian idea of God than to a 
philosophical view of nature." ^ 

Consider these facts. Modern science has made 
it impossible to think of the universe except as 
a revelation of intelligence. Its fundamental as- 
sumption is, that underlying everything, at the 
foundation of all existences, isjthought, is reason. 

Modern science does not know how life began, 
but it shows us life developing from a few pri- 
1 Lux Mundi, pp. 97, 98. 



44 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

mary germs, into the order and beauty and gran- 
deur of this marvelous world. Who stocked these 
germs with such miraculous powers, who packed 
into them the potencies that have unfolded into 
the life that now fills forest and field and air and 
ocean, that builds our houses and throngs our 
cities, science does not try to tell; it puts the 
mighty fact before us and leaves us to interpret it. 

But when science tells us that these living things 
have been shaped and fashioned in their growth by 
their environment, we cannot help pausing to think 
what that Environment is ; and if the doctrine of 
the divine omnipresence is true, we certainly would 
not wish to deny what science affirms. If sur- 
rounding every one of these growing lives there is 
an Environment, in every atom, in every force of 
which the mighty God, the Lord, the Creator of 
the ends of the earth, resides and works, and if all 
these changes are the results of the direct action of 
his wisdom and his power, the doctrine of evolu- 
tion is a most impressive demonstration of the pre- 
sence of God in the world. Let me close with a 
word of John Fiske, who is, perhaps, the most 
intelligent American expounder of this theory : — 

"The doctrine of Evolution, which affects our 
thought about all things, brings before us with viv- 
idness the conception of an ever-present God, not 
an absentee God, who once manufactured a cosmic 
machine cajDable of running itself except for a 
little jog or poke here and there in the shape of 
a special providence. The doctrine of Evolution 



HOW THE WORLDS WERE MADE 45 

destroys the conception of the world as a machine. 
It makes God our constant refuge and support, 
and Nature his true revelation ; and when all its 
religious implications shall have been set forth, it 
will be seen to be the most potent ally that Chris- 
tianity has ever had in elevating mankind." 



ni 

WHAT IS THE SUPERXATTRAL ? 

The chief stumbling-block of reason in these 
days is found in the conception of the supernatu- 
ral. If that could be got rid of, the way of belief 
would be made smooth for many feet. 

The researches of science have succeeded in es- 
tablishing on so firm a foundation the doctrine of 
the imiversality and immutability of law, that there 
seems to be no room left in the universe for the 
supernatural or the miraculous. A writer in the 
" Westminster Review," several years ago, used 
this language : " Anti-supernaturalism is the final, 
irreversible sentence of scientific philosophy, and 
the real dogmatist and hypothesis-maker is the 
theologian. That the world is governed by fixed 
laws is the first article in the creed of science, and 
to disbelieve whatever is at variance with those 
uniform laws, whatever contradicts a complete in- 
duction, is an imperative intellectual duty. A par- 
ticular miracle is credible to him alone who already 
believes in supernatural agency. Its credibility 
rests on an assumption, the assumption of such 
agency. But our most comprehensive scientific 
experience has detected no such agency. There 



WHAT IS THE SUPERNATURAL? 47 

is no miracle in nature ; there is no evidence of 
any miracle-working agency in nature ; there is no 
fact in nature to justify the expectation of mira- 
cle." 1 

Special attention may be called to this manifesto 
as a good sample of what modern science is not. 
Modern science does not make dogmatic state- 
ments of this kind. It does not say of any propo- 
sition, " This is the final, irreversible sentence of 
scientific philosophy." It only says, So far as the 
facts have been collected and compared they bear 
this interpretation. To assume that no more facts 
can be collected, that no new light can be thrown 
upon the subject, that the case is forever closed, 
is in the last degree unscientific. With John Rob- 
inson, of Ley den, the pastor of the church that 
landed on Plymouth Rock, science always expects 
more light to break forth from God's works as 
well as from God's word, and is always ready to 
welcome it. There is considerable of this kind of 
dogmatism — sometimes, as in this case, outspoken, 
sometimes latent and implicit — in the utterances 
of men who speak as the oracles of science. There 
is far less of it than there was twenty years ago, 
for the fact is plainer than once it was that the 
scientific spirit is a spirit of reverence ; but when- 
ever we fall in with it we ought to remember that 
men who talk in this dogmatic tone are not, in any 
true sense of the word, scientific men ; the spirit 

1 Quoted by James Freeman Clarke, in Orthodoxy : its Truths 
and Errors^ p. 81. 



48 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

which speaks through their lips is the spirit of the 
old theology, masquerading in the garb of science. 

Disputes of this character arise largely, however, 
from a failure to agree upon definitions. What is 
the sui>ernatural ? What is a miracle ? If these 
preliminary questions can be satisfactorily an- 
swered, many of the debates will come to an end 
at once. Xot all of them, but many of them. For 
there are radical differences of theory ; there are 
theologians on the one side and philosophers on 
the other with whom I cannot agree, and who cer- 
tainly cannot agree with one another. The more 
clearly their several views are expressed, the more 
irreconcilable will seem to be their antagonism. It 
is not possible to do away with all differences of 
opinion. But the number of differences would be 
considerably reduced if the contending parties 
would agree upon their definitions. 

" That the world is governed by fixed laws," 
says the authority I have quoted, " is the first arti- 
cle in the creed of science.'* What is meant by fixed 
laws ? Is it meant that everything which is now- 
taking place has always been taking place and will 
always continue to take place ? That is not true. 
The sun is rising and setting now every twenty- 
four hours : but it has not always been rising and 
setting, and nobody can prove that it will always 
rise and set. Indeed, no careful student of astron- 
omy pretends to believe that it always will. 
" What is the history of Nature," asks Professor 
Fisher, " but a record of perpetual changes, — new 



WHAT IS THE SUPERNATURAL? 49 

beings, new phenomena, and new collocations of 
phenomena presenting themselves on the scene ? 
To this extent, our expectation that the future will 
be like the past is subject to qualification." ^ 

It is true that we do expect that the same 
antecedents will be followed by the same conse- 
quents. We believe that water will solidify next 
year as it does this year at 32° Fahrenheit, and that 
it will become vapor at our altitude at 212°. We 
believe that the specific gravity of silver will con- 
tinue, through the centuries, to be greater than 
that of aluminum. But this is, in truth, not know- 
ledge ; it is faith, — what Professor Huxley calls 
" the great act of faith " that every student of sci- 
ence is compelled to exercise, and on which all his 
investigations are founded. He believes that like 
antecedents will be followed by like consequents. 
He believes in a reign of law. That these laws are 
so fixed that they can never be altered is, however, 
a piece of dogmatism upon which he does not ven- 
ture. 

Of one thing, however, the student of science 
feels very sure, and that is that there is a reason 
for everything ; that there is no process and no 
event which cannot be rationally explained. The 
universe is reasonable — this is the foundation of 
science. But this is a very different thing from 
saying that all which takes place in the world is 
the product of an unalterable mechanism. The 
acts of a wise man are rational and can be ration- 

1 Faith and nationalism, p. 138. 



50 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

ally explained ; it does not follow that lie is a mere 
machine, and can never act in any other way than 
the way in which he does act. When Mr. Huxley 
says that " the progress of science has in all ages 
meant and now means more than ever the exten- 
sion of the province of what we call matter and 
causation, and the concomitant gradual banishment 
from all regions of human thought of what we call 
spirit and spontaneity,"^ he makes a statement 
which probably expresses the bent of his own 
mind, but which does not express the real ten- 
dencies of scientific thought in these last days. 
The truth is that there is just now a strong move- 
ment of mind toward the recognition of the fact 
that the spiritual side of life is quite as well worth 
study as the physical side. 

With these preliminary cautions against an anti- 
theological bias which is not any more rational or 
scientific than the theological bias of the church- 
man, let us come directly to the questions before 
us. 

What, then, is a miracle ? The common notion 
is that it is a violation of or a deviation from the 
laws of nature. Here is the law of gravitation. 
Some force, whose nature we do not at all under- 
stand, but whose action we can measure, pulls this 
book which I hold in my hand downward toward 
the centre of the earth. If the action of this force 
should be interrupted or susjDended, so that the 
book had no weight, but remained motionless in 

1 Quoted by Bascom in The New Theology, p. 65. 



WHAT IS THE SUPERNATURAL? 51 

the air, with no support under it, and no other nat- 
ural force counteracting the force of gravitation, 
that wouhl be a miracle. But this definition of 
a miracle is not biblical ; we are not told in the 
Bible that natural laws are ever violated or sus- 
pended. The biblical term for miracle is either 
"wonder" or " sign." The events called mira- 
cles are described as wonderful works, and as 
signs which indicate the presence of God. But 
many things are wonderful which are not unnatu- 
ral. They are wonderful to us because they are 
unusual, or because we do not understand the mode 
of their operation. They may be a sign to us of 
the presence of some one with knowledge or power 
that we do not possess. The old church fathers 
explained miracles as being in harmony with na- 
ture, not as violations of nature. Origen assumed 
the existence in nature of a higher, ideal, divine 
order of which the miracle was the expression. 
And Augustine says expressly that " a miracle is 
not contrary to nature, but to what we know of 
nature." Augustine conceives of nature as wholly 
under the control of God, and argues that " what- 
ever is done by Him who appoints all natural order 
and measure and proportion must be natural in 
every case." 

There may be elements and forces in nature 
with which we are not familiar. Nothing is much 
nearer to us than the air we breathe, and the phy- 
sicists have very confidently assumed that they 
knew all about it; it contained so much oxygen 



52 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

and so much nitrogen, with infinitesimal amounts 
of carbon dioxid, ammonia, ozone, and organic 
matter ; but recently a new substance, never before 
heard of or dreamed of, has been detected in the 
air ; " argon," the chemists call it. Just what it 
is good for nobody seems to know ;" it seems to be 
a kind of sleeping partner, the unemployed con- 
tingent in the atmospheric society. That is the 
meaning of the Greek name they have given it, 
argon^ — the idler. It is quite possible that the 
chemists have wronged him, and that we shall yet 
find out that he is a very busy fellow after all. I 
summon him here, however, only in support of my 
contention that we may have a great deal yet to 
learn about the most common elements and forces ; 
and that much which seems to us miraculous may 
be only the employment of unfamiliar powers. 

Many of the things that ?vre the merest common- 
places to us would seem miracles to a South Sea 
Islander. Those people from Dahomey in the 
Midway Plaisance at the Columbian Exposition 
were seeing wonders and signs every day of their 
stay in this country. 

Not only by our knowledge of natural forces do 
we learn to perform mighty works which appear 
miraculous to those of lower intelligence, there 
seems also to be a degree of power which the mind 
exerts over the body, a supremacy of the intellect- 
ual or the spiritual over the material, to which men 
are capable of attaining, and by means of which 
many wonderful things are done. The power of 



WHAT IS THE SUPERNATURAL? 53 

the mind to influence bodily conditions is very 
great, and the contagion of courage and hope and 
determination can be communicated from one mind 
to another. Indeed, I am not at all sure that 
health, abounding vitality, is not in some degree 
contagious. It seems to me that virtue does some- 
times go out of a thoroughly healthy nurse into the 
body of an enfeebled patient. That there is such 
a thing as a physical communication of vigor may 
be all fancy ; the effect may all be wrought by the 
invigoration of the mind of the patient. But 
these experiences, concerning which there will be 
no dispute, may throw some light on what are 
called miracles of healing. That one who was per- 
fectly whole, in body and in mind, and whose sym- 
pathetic identification with his ' f ellowmen was also 
perfect, might heal many diseases, by the com- 
munication of his own life, I can easily believe. 
That Jesus Christ was able to do such work as 
this does not seem to me, in view of what I believe 
him to have been, an incredible thing. It is what 
I should expect him to do. But this kind of work 
was not done by any violation of nature ; it was 
done by the completion and perfection of nature ; 
it was the realization of that word of his which 
every day gathers larger meaning, " I came not to 
destroy, but to fulfill." 

I can say all this without crediting the prepos- 
terous theories of Christian Science or the fairy 
tales of faith cure. These stories generally bear 
upon their face the marks of absurdity. Such 



54 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

powers will never be exercised, except by people 
who are elevated physically, mentally, and spirit- 
ually to a very high estate of being; and such 
people will not be vaunting these powers, or adver- 
tising themselves in the newspapers, or turning 
their exceptional gifts into a means of revenue ; 
and when they open their mouths to speak to us 
they will have something to say that is not the 
quintessence of absurdity. 

To miracles, then, considered simply as wonder- 
ful works, as the action upon nature of higher in- 
telligences, or as the employment of agencies or 
laws with which we are not familiar, there can be 
no scientific or philosophical objection. The man 
who says, " There can be no intelligence possessing 
a knowledge of nature that I do not possess," or, 
" There can be no natural laws or processes with 
which I am not familiar," does not speak with the 
humility of science. 

But the idea of the supernatural, it is objected, 
contradicts the fundamental assumptions of sci- 
ence, and therefore there is an overwhelming pre- 
sumption against it. Dr. Bascom, who does not 
sympathize with this objection, has nevertheless 
stated it very clearly : — 

" The scientific tendency, later in its develop- 
ment, leads us to magnify the natural, and, in its 
extreme expression, to exclude with it the super- 
natural. The terms of exact knowledge lie chiefly 
in physical things and events, bound together as 
causes and effects. The extension of these rela- 



WHAT IS THE SUPERNATURAL? 55 

tions is the expansion of determinate thought, and 
all the successes of the past century urge us to 
complete the work by giving full sweep to the 
ruling idea. This movement has for the moment 
gathered great momentum, and those who wish to 
put any restraints upon it, or supplement it by 
earlier forms of inquiry, are easily pushed aside, 
or looked upon as having scant claims even to this 
courtesy. 

" While there have been many secondary points 
of discussion between religion and science, points 
at which science has been more frequently in the 
right, the real difficulty of reconciliation between 
the two methods of thought is found in this very 
thing, the supernatural. Science has an instinc- 
tive disrelish for the supernatural, as something in 
whose presence its own methods are of no avail, 
something from whose presence there goes forth 
an obscuring, chilling mist of uncertainty, that 
brings inquiry speedily to an end. The super- 
natural, instead of being an essential term in a 
higher order, is felt to be a loss of all order in 
chaos and confusion. The controversy, therefore, 
between science and religion, our knowledge of the 
physical w^orld and our knowledge of the spiritual 
world, can only be settled by a just definition of 
the natural and the supernatural, and by a deter- 
mination of their dependence on each other." ^ 

What then is meant by the natural ? The term 
describes, in the first place, all objects, events, pro- 
1 The New Theology, pp. 75, 76. 



56 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

cesses, phenomena, which are related to each other 
as causes and effects. " It covers," says Dr. Bas- 
com, "all things and events which are interlocked 
by causal relations, — phenomena that are settled 
in their form and order of procedure. Every 
purely physical occurrence is completely condi- 
tioned by coexistent and antecedent circumstances, 
and it is these fixed dependencies which constitute 
its nature. However variable this nature may 
seem to be, the appearance is deceptive, for all 
results are perfectly defined by the energies in- 
volved." ^ This is the common signification of the 
natural, as contrasted with the supernatural. It 
describes all those forces which are covered by the 
law of the conservation of energy. The natural 
realm, as the scientific mind conceives it, is the 
realm that is governed by laws. These laws are 
not all physical ; there are certain laws of mind, 
also ; laws of association, laws of resemblance, laws 
of thought. It is too much to say that these 
mental laws are all fixed and invariable. But 
there is, beyond all question, a certain order in 
our thinking ; and we can often discover the gene- 
sis of our thoughts. Some of the operations of the 
mind, as well as those of the body and of the phy- 
sical world, come under the control of law. 

But is it true that everything that happens in 
this world is the outcome of these unchangeable 
laws? When we say that the world is governed 
by fixed laws, do we mean that these laws explain 

The New Theology, p. 77. 



WHAT IS THE SUPERNATURAL? 57 

every event that takes place ? If we do mean any 
such thing as that, we are talking nonsense. I 
will show you, now, an event that cannot be ex- 
plained by reference to any natural laws. Here is 
an electric light, by my side upon this desk. It is 
burning now ; the process is going on under natu- 
ral law, — a law which I will not stop to explain. 
It is sufficient to say that whenever you have the 
same conditions which are present here, the same 
wires, the same carbon filaments, the same adjust- 
ments, the same electric currents, you will have 
the same light. So far, the whole process is under 
fixed law. But is there any fixed law which deter- 
mines just how long this light is going to burn, 
and just when it is going to stop burning? No, 
there is not. I think that it will stop burning now 
within a very few seconds ; but no law is going to 
stop it. I am going to stop it. There ! What 
natural law was it that determined when that lamp 
should cease to glow ? It was my free will that 
put it out. I might have put it out several sec- 
onds sooner, or several seconds later, or I might 
have chosen not to put it out at all. Now I pro- 
pose to light it again. If everything which hap- 
pens in this world is controlled by fixed, unchange- 
able laws, then the moment at which I shall light 
it is fixed, and can be predicted by one who knows 
all the forces at work. Is there any scientist in 
this room, any scientist in this universe, no matter 
how much he knows about electrical currents, and 
incandescent lamps, and nervous tissues, and mus- 



58 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

cular contractions, who can predict the second at 
which that lamp will be lighted? I think not. 
It will be lighted when I get ready to light it. 
The work will all be done under fixed laws, under 
the laws of electricity, and the laws of muscular 
contraction, and the laws of the transmission of 
nervous energy from the brain to the fingers ; the 
action of the lamp is under fixed law; the action 
of my body is under fixed law ; but the power that 
sets these natural forces in operation, that starts 
the nerve currents in motion from my brain to my 
fingers, and that thus moves the muscles of my fin- 
gers, and turns the switch and kindles the light, is 
the power of a free personality which acts upon 
this chain of natural causation, initiating new 
movements, making new combinations, bringing to 
pass many things which these fixed laws of them- 
selves would never compass. It was a supernatu- 
ral power which extinguished and relighted that 
lamp. Every free personality is a supernatural 
power. It is not under fixed law. It is over fixed 
law, and uses fixed law, in myriads of ways, to 
accomplish its own intelligent purposes. 

Thought is a supernatural process. There are 
trains of ideas passing through my mind, by the 
laws of association ; but I can command this pro- 
cession to halt ; I can take one of these ideas, and 
fasten my attention upon it, and think of it as long 
as I will, and then dismiss it, and call another. 
The perfectly healthy mind has power over its 
own trains of thought ; it is only the enfeebled or 



WHAT IS THE SUPERNATUKAL ? 59 

diseased mind that is dominated by fancies which 
it cannot dismiss. The power of thinking is the 
power of a free personality which is not driven by 
mental visions, but marshals and combines them 
in an order of its own choosing. 

It is involved also in what has been said that 
choice is a supernatural act. The very word im- 
plies this. Choice which was governed by fixed 
law would be a contradiction in terms. In the 
realization of his choices, man often finds himself 
unable to counteract natural laws, but the choices 
themselves are supernatural. " Having, thus, free- 
dom and the power of causation," says Dr. Mark 
Hopkins, " there is a sense in which man is the 
image of God as a creator. Place a being thus 
free, having the power of causation, and with in- 
telligence, in the midst of a fixed order of things, 
so that he can foreknow what the consequences of 
his acts will be, and it is plain that he can pur- 
posely create or cause to be a future that, but for 
him, would not have been. Feeble as is this image 
of the creative power of God, it yet indicates for 
man a place in this universe higher than that of 
suns and stars. He is not wholly as the driftwood 
on the stream or the atom in the whirlwind, atom 
though he be, but he has a will that goes for some- 
thino' in that which is to be." ^ 

Love in its highest manifestations is super- 
natural. The love which came to us under fixed 
law we should not highly value. The kindness 

1 The Scriptural Idea of God, p. 72. 



60 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

that is constrained, the devotion that is compul- 
sory, are not the expressions of love. Love is, 
indeed, the fulfilling of law : but when all law is 
fulfilled, its impulse is not exhausted ; it is still 
able to do exceeding abundantly above all that law 
can ask or think. Its very characteristic is that it 
knows no limits or definitions. Space and time do 
not condition it ; its range is boundless, its life is 
eternal. 

These are the attributes of a free personality, — 
thought, choice, love. Wherever you find these, 
you find something that is not under fixed law ; it 
is simply absurd to think of any of them as under 
the dominion of fixed law. In your own soul are 
thought and choice and love. You cannot, without 
stultifying yourself, say that you do not believe in 
the supernatural. You yourself are a supernatural 
being ; every hour of your life you are employing 
supernatural powers. 

This search of man for the supernatural, and 
his skepticism concerning it, is much like the search 
of the fishes for the sea and of the birds for the 
air : the supernatural is the very element in which 
his manhood lives and moves and has its being; 
the spirit that exists in the image of God the crea- 
tor of the universe could hardly be other than 
supernatural. 

We find very few persons in these days who are 
ready to confess themselves atheists, though we find 
many who are troubled with doubts about the 
supernatural. Some devout and reverent minds 



WHAT IS THE SUPERNATURAL? 61 

confess to such uncertainties. Might I address to 
such persons one or two simple questions ? You 
believe in God. Is not God supernatural ? Has 
the Author of the universe no power over the uni- 
verse ? Is He imprisoned in the order which He 
has himself established ? Can you conceive of Him 
as no more than the personification of Fate ? You 
know that you are a free personality ? If He is 
unfree, is not the creature possessed of attributes 
nobler than the Creator ? It seems to me that we, 
as free moral beings, would stultify ourselves if 
we tried to worship a being who was not himself a 
free personality. 

That God is a supernatural Power will hardly 
be questioned, I dare say, by any of us. But we 
saw, in the last chapter, that God is immanent 
in nature. " God dwelleth within all things, and 
without all things, above all things, and beneath 
all things," said Gregory the Great. " The imme- 
diate operation of the Creator is closer to every- 
thing than the operation of any secondary cause," 
said Thomas Aquinas. The doctrine of the imma- 
nence of God is no new-fangled notion ; it has been 
held by great thinners in all the ages. Now if 
this supernatural Power — this Being who, in the 
words of Athanasius, " contains all things, but is 
contained by none " — is present in every atom and 
every force of the whole creation, then Nature her- 
self, in her inmost being, in the deepest secrets of 
her life, is supernatural. 

" Below the realm of mechanical necessity," says 



62 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

Professor Bowne, " there is a realm of ends which 
condition and control that necessity. Here nature 
is fluid. Here are the roots of nature. Here 
nature appears, not as an independent something, 
but as a flowing forth of divine energy. It has no 
laws of its own which oppose a bar to the divine 
purpose, but all its laws and all its ongoings are 
but the expression of that purpose. . . . Nature 
is no independent power over against God, which 
must first be conquered before it can be modified ; 
it is only the divine purpose flowing forth into 
realization. The constancy of nature, also, must 
be viewed as founded not in some mysterious neces- 
sity, but solely in the constancy of the divine pur- 
poses. We do not, then, regard the supernatural 
in its ordinary workings as breaking through phe- 
nomenal laws, or through the chain of mechanical 
necessity which is supposed to rule in nature; but 
we regard it as founding and maintaining that 
necessity by which the phenomenal order is real- 
ized. . . . We teach no breaks in the phenomenal 
order, or in the mechanism of nature, but rather 
that that mechanism, in all its phases, is pliant to 
the divine purpose, and is but ^n expression of the 
divine purpose." ^ 

No mere analogy can set forth the truth of the 
relation of the Creator to the creation ; but the 
relation of the mind to the body may give us some 
dim suggestion of what it may be. My mind re- 
sides in and controls at every instant all parts of 
1 Studies in Theism, pp. 315-317. 



WHAT IS THE SUPERNATURAL? 63 

my body, and is yet confined not within its mem- 
bers, but ranges free through space and time. So 
the divine Intelligence abides in and reveals itself 
through the whole of nature, and yet is not con- 
tained in nature, nor identified with it ; for it is 
not only in all and through all, it is also over all. 
The immanent God is also the transcendent God. 
He is the Power that energizes nature, He is also 
the Father of our spirits. 

It is not, then, in miracle that God is most 
clearly manifested ; He comes closest to us in the 
deeper meanings of the commonest facts of our 
lives. In the air we breathe, in the daily bread 
that nourishes our bodies, in the sunshine that 
warms us, in the blossoms that smile upon us, — 
not less, perhaps, in the frosts and blasts and rude 
resistances of nature that call out our energies and 
discipline our wills. He momently reveals himself 
to all who have the mind of the Spirit. " Blessed 
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 
They have not far to look. For every day and 
everywhere — 

" The Lord is in his Holy Place, 

In all things near and far, 
Shekinah of the snowflake, He, 

And g-lory of the star, 
And secret of the April wind 

That stirs the field to flowers, 
Whose little tahernacles rise 

To hold him through the hours." 

This discussion may have enabled us to see the 
truth of what Dr. Bascom has said : — ■ 



64 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

" The natural and the supernatural are different 
sides of the same thing, the earthward side and 
the heavenward side, the outer and the inner side. 
When we walk in the light of our intuitions and 
affections, we are most touched by a sense of the 
divine Presence ; when we take counsel and put 
our hands to work shrewdly on the things about us, 
we are most impressed by law, by stubborn condi- 
tions, by the slowly yielding material into which 
human and divine thoughts transform themselves. 
God and man, if they are to meet in activity at all, 
and the overshadowing attributes of the one feed, 
without engulfing, the feeble faculties of the other, 
must find a middle term which shall be the hidino; 
of the divine Presence on the one side, and the 
drawing out of human powers on the other side. 
Nature is such a middle term. God here meets us, 
makes terms with us, gives us our lessons, and 
assigns us our tasks." ^ 

Let us meet Him here with, docile minds, with 
reverent hearts ; let us sit at his feet and listen to 
his words ; let us take his yoke upon us and learn 
of Him ; for his Spirit waits to guide us into all 
truth ; and to know Him aright is life eternal. 
1 The New Theology, p. 90. 



IV 

WHAT IS THE BIBLE? 

We have a letter of Paul the Apostle to a young 
man in whom he was deeply interested, who had 
been his traveling companion and assistant in the 
ministry, and had shared with him the hardships 
and the harvests of his arduous campaigns, in 
which are these words : — 

"Abide thou in the things which thou hast 
learned and hast been assured of, knowing of 
whom thou hast learned them ; and that from a 
babe thou hast known the sacred writings which 
are able to make thee wise unto salvation through 
faith, which is in Christ Jesus. Every scripture 
inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for 
reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteous- 
ness ; that the man of God may be complete, fur- 
nished completely unto every good work." ^ 

This is good counsel for young men in these 
days, and for those no longer young. In our 
hands, as in Timothy's, there are sacred writings 
which we have known from our infancy, and 
which are able, if we rightly use them, to make 
us wise unto salvation. The sacred writings which 
1 2 Tim. iii. 14-17. 



66 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRESES? 

are familiar to US are not identical with those 
upon which Timothj had been brought np: we 
haTe some books that he had not, and it is pro- 
bable that he had some abont which we have 
not mnch knowledge, in which, at any rate, we 
have not been instmeted. This Teiy letter to 
Timothy, for example, which has been to us, all 
our lives, a sacred writing, was not so regarded, 
I dare say, by the young man who receired it. It 
was just a letter to him from his great friend, 
Paul the Apostle ; that he Tery highly valued it, 
there can be no doubt ; that he received the words 
of Paul as one who was under divine guidance is 
altogether probable ; but he did not imagine that 
this letter would by and by be bound up with those 
other sacred writings, long familiar to him, to be- 
come a part of a Bible for the human race. There 
is no evidence that these epistles of PauL or any 
other of the Xew Testament writings, were re- 
garded as sacred scriptures on their first appear- 
ance. They were carefully preserved by those 
who received them, and in the course of fifty or 
siity years they b^an to be collected and quoted 
as possessing a sacred character ; but the earliest 
Christian fathers do not refer to them : when they 
speak of sacred scriptures it is always to the Jew- 
ish scriptures that they are referring. It was of 
these Jewish scriptures, of course, that Paol is 
here speaking. Timothy could not have been in- 
structed in the Xew Testament scriptures, for in 
his childhood not one of them was in existence: 



WHAT IS THE BIBLE? 67 

and those of them that were in existence when 
Paul wrote this letter to him had not come to be 
considered as sacred writings. 

But I said that Timothy probably had certain 
writings, regarded as sacred, which we have not. 
Undoubtedly Timothy possessed the Septuagint 
version of the Old Testament. It was this version 
which was chiefly used by our Lord and his apos- 
tles. We know this, because their quotations from 
the Old Testament are almost always taken directly 
from this Old Greek Bible. Out of thirty-seven 
quotations made by our Lord from the ancient 
writings, all but three are cited word for word 
from the Septuagint. Now this Septuagint con- 
tained, along with the books of our Old Testa- 
ment, those other books which we have separated 
from it, under the title of the Apocrypha. There 
is evidence in the epistles that these writings 
were familiar to their authors, for there are quite 
a number of unmistakable allusions to them. Tim- 
othy had, then, less Bible than we have in one 
part, and more than we have in another. Since 
Timothy's day not a little has been added to 
the canon of sacred scripture, and not a little has 
been taken away, by Protestants, at least. But 
we must bear in mind that whatever Paul says, in 
this passage, about the sacred writings as a whole, 
must be interpreted as referring to the collection 
which Timothy had in his hands. Does Paul mean 
to say that these writings are all inspired of God, 
and therefore infallible? Does he make this state- 



68 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

ment concerning tlie story of Susanna, and Bel and 
the Dragon, and Tobit, and the rest? Manifestly 
that would be putting upon his words a very doubt- 
ful construction. We shall be obliged to use his 
(counsel to Timothy with some caution. What can 
he mean when he says, as the old version makes 
him say, " All scripture is given by inspiration of 
God " ? The answer is that he does not say any 
such thing. The new version, from which I have 
quoted, correctly reports him. What he says is 
that every scripture which is insjjired of God is 
profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, 
for instruction in righteousness. Instead of attrib- 
uting inspiration to all those scriptures which 
Timothy had in his hands, he simply said that 
every inspired scripture was profitable reading. 
There is even a hint in these words that they are 
not of equal value ; that the quality of inspiration 
may be lacking to some of them. When this text 
is quoted as a sweeping statement that the whole 
of the Old Testament is infallibly inspired, it is 
grossly misinterpreted. Explained in this way it 
proves, as we have seen, a great deal too much. 

Nevertheless it is true that Paul does refer to 
the scriptures in Timothy's hands, and that he 
does strongly commend them to him as the sources 
of wisdom and inspiration. If Paul's language 
concerning them is much less sweeping and ex- 
travagant than it is generally supposed to be, it is 
still cordial and positive. It does not forbid us to 
use our common sense in judging these old scrip- 



WHAT IS THE BIBLE? 69 

tures, but it does most earnestly counsel us to use 
them, and bids us expect to find in them the illu- 
mination of our thought and the invigoration of our 
manhood. They may not be infallible, but they 
are able to make us wise unto salvation through 
faith in Christ Jesus. 

I wish that I could get from all readers of this 
chapter the same open-minded, sympathetic, rever- 
ent treatment of the Bible that Paul expected from 
Timothy. But in order that this may be, it is ne- 
cessary that their minds should be cleared of mis- 
conceptions and illusions. The Bible as it is can 
" do for us exceeding abundantly above all that we 
ask or think;" but in order that it may render to 
us its highest and best service we must take it for 
what it is, and not entertain any false notions 
about it. The old English theologian who is 
known to history as " the judicious Hooker " gives 
us this word of caution : " As incredible praises 
given to men do often abate and impair the credit 
of the deserved commendation, so we must like- 
wise take great heed lest by attributing to Scrip- 
ture more than it can have, the incredibility of 
that do cause even those things which it hath 
abundantly to be less reverently esteemed." ^ Ex- 
aggerated and false ideas of the Bible are sure 
to breed infidelity in inquisitive and independent 
minds. When, by impartial investigation, men 
convince themselves that the Bible is not such a 
book as it has been represented to be, their natural 
^ Works, Book II., chap, viii. 7. 



70 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

impulse is to regard it as a fraud and to cast it 
aside altogether. I think that this is the precise 
history of a very large proportion of those who 
have rejected Christianity. The sin and the crime 
of drivinof men from the doors of the church are to 
be charged very largely upon the religious teach- 
ers who, with the light of this decade blazing all 
around them, continue to make statements about 
the Bible which a very little careful study of the 
Bible itself will prove to be untrue. 

In view of all this erroneous and highly mis- 
chievous teaching, it is necessary to begin by clear- 
ing the ground. The first thing that we need to 
learn is what the Bible is not. 

It is not an infallible book. Where men got 
the idea that it is infallible we may not be sure ; 
certain it is that they did not get it from the Bible 
itself. No such claim can be found anywhere upon 
the pages of the Bible. Not one of the writers 
asserts his own infallibility. 

Probably the theory of inerrancy is founded on 
what is called an a 'priori argument. Men said : 
"The Bible is the Book of God. If God gives 
us a book, it must be infallible. That is to be as- 
sumed beforehand. For God is omniscient ; He can 
make no mistakes, and therefore we know that He 
could permit no mistakes to find their way into his 
Book." 

Now this way of determining beforehand what 
God will do is rather venturesome. A good many 
years ago, a certain very famous Bishop Butler, 



WHAT IS THE BIBLE? 71 

who wrote a book that has since been famous, 
entitled " An Analogy of Religion, Natural and 
Kevealed, to the Constitution and Course of Na- 
ture," gave us a very strong demonstration of the 
danger of reasoning in this way. For there were 
those in his day who were contending that a reve- 
lation from God must be universal, — that it could 
not be given to one tribe or nation, but must be 
bestowed upon all men alike ; also that there could 
be in such a revelation nothing obscure or diffi- 
cult of interpretation ; that it must be plain to the 
apprehension of all men. And if you will stop to 
think about it you will at once see that you have 
precisely as much right to make these affirmations 
beforehand, as you have to say beforehand that 
the Bible as God's book must be infallible. It 
would appear to be reasonable to say that if God 
is the universal Father, He must give to all his 
children the same gifts of light and knowledge ; 
and that if He sends them a message it will be a 
message which they can interpret without any un- 
certainty as to its meaning. And yet we know 
that the Bible — our Bible — was not given to all 
the tribes of earth, but only to one obscure people ; 
and that it is not so clear in its meaning but that 
men find much difficulty in understanding it. But, 
as Bishop Butler goes on to show, we find exactly 
the same state of things existing in Nature and 
in Providence. We could just as well have argued 
beforehand that the universal Father would give 
all his children equal portions of natural light and 



72 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

knowledge ; and that the Book of Nature would 
be writ so plain that the unlearned could under- 
stand it at a glance. Nature is from God ; might 
we not say that it must therefore be perfect in all 
its parts, and holy in all its works ? This argu- 
ment is, of course, addressed to devout men who 
believe that God is the author of nature. And I 
ask them whether the assumption that the Bible 
must be infallible because God is omniscient is not 
precisely equivalent to the assumption that nature 
must be flawless and sinless because God is all 
powerful and all benevolent ? The truth is that 
the methods which the divine wisdom has adopted 
for the education of the world are not always such 
as we should have looked for. His ways are not 
our ways. And instead of determining beforehand 
that the Bible, because it is God's book, must be 
so and so, and then warping the words of the 
Bible to fit our preconceived theories, it is better 
for us to go directly to the Bible itself and find 
out what it is. If we discover in its pages errors 
and contradictions, that fact need no more convince 
us that it has not come from Him than the discov- 
ery of cruelty and misery in nature convinces us 
that it has not come from Him. 

The truth is that the Bible is not only God's 
book, it is also man's book. A human element is 
mingled with the divine on every one of its pages. 
We have the treasure, as Paul says, in earthen 
vessels. The truth of God must be expressed in 
the words of men. So far as it is conveyed in 



WHAT IS THE BIBLE? 73 

human language, it must be poured into the moulds 
which men have fashioned for it. It is needless to 
say that these moulds will often be found inade- 
quate to contain the full divine idea. Any one can 
see that this must be so. The idea that the mind 
of God can be infallibly expressed in the words of 
men is on the face of it preposterous. There must 
be more or less of imperfection and incompleteness 
in such a revelation. It may be sufficient to show 
us, in a general way, the great truths that it is 
needful for us to know, but it cannot be literally 
or verbally infallible. 

I will not stop long to point out the errors of the 
Bible. Let it be sufficient to say that the Bible is 
not scientifically infallible. " Thus, for example," 
says Professor Kirkpatrick, " the narrative of crea- 
tion in the first chapter of Genesis, while it pre- 
sents a most remarkable counterpart to the discov- 
eries of science, cannot be said to tally precisely 
with the records written on the rocks, so far at any 
rate as they have been read at present." More 
than this can be said on both sides of the ques- 
tion. Not only does this record fail to tally pre- 
cisely with our scientific knowledge, but several 
features of the narrative distinctly disagree with 
what we know of the orioin of thino^s. This on 
the one side. But on the other side it is true that 
these first chapters of Genesis give us the founda- 
tions of all our scientific knowledge ; they teach us 
that the universe is one ; they bring before us " one 
God, one law, one element ; " they reveal to us the 



74 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

supremacy of the Creator over tlie creation ; they 
help us to see that creation is progressive ; they 
show us man as the crown of the creation, — the 
whole finding its completion in Him ; they give us 
the grand optimistic conception which is the motive 
power of modern progress, that all things are work- 
ing together for good ; that there is — 

" One far-off divine event 
To -wliich the whole creation moves." 

How much science is indebted, how much progress 
is indebted, to the presence in this first chapter of 
Genesis of these great constructive ideas, we shall 
probably never know, until we have the long leisure 
of eternity in which to study the philosophy of 
history. In the midst of certain misconceptions 
respecting geological and astronomical laws, these 
great spiritual and ethical facts stand out clear as 
the sunlight. I believe that this truth is God- 
given ; that the reason why the men who wrote 
these words were so sublimely right in their treat- 
ment of these very highest themes was that God 
had come into their lives. 

The Bible is not historically infallible. On the 
whole the history is veracious. The recent discov- 
eries of old inscriptions in the ruins of Nineveh 
and Babylon have wonderfully confirmed a great 
many of the historical statements of the Old Tes- 
tament, but they have also contradicted a few of 
them and proved them to be inaccurate. What is 
much more conclusive, there are quite a number 
of instances in which the Bible contradicts itself, 



WHAT IS THE BIBLE? 75 

statements in one book conflicting with statements 
in another book, and utterly refusing, after all the 
twisting and quibbling of the commentators, to be 
reconciled. There is no honest way of dealing 
with a good many of these discrepant statements 
but to admit that one or the other must be wrong. 

There are also errors not a few which have crept 
into the text through the carelessness of copyists. 
Some pairs of Hebrew letters closely resemble each 
other; the scribe who mistook one for the other 
might change a word radically, and give to the 
sentence an entirely different turn. There are 
scores of such errors as these. 

And there are other imperfections even more 
serious. As the divine thought must find expres- 
sion in human words, so the divine goodness must 
find expression in human lives. The lives of men 
at best but imperfectly reflect the divine goodness. 
The moral natures of men are often so undevel- 
oped that you cannot make them comprehend the 
rio'hteousness and love of God. And therefore the 
revelation given by God to half savage men must 
needs be morally imperfect. They are given as 
much as they can receive, and as their natures are 
gradually purified and enlarged they are given 
more. Thus the revelation must needs be morally 
progressive ; its early stages must contain com- 
mands or permissions that express a partial moral- 
ity ; men will be directed to do some things that 
their children's children, in later generations, would 
be forbidden to do. Jesus tells us that some of 



76 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

the commandments and laws of the early Hebrews 
were given to them because of the hardness of 
their hearts ; he himself quotes some of these old 
laws — prefaced, in the Old Testament scriptures, 
by a " Thus saith the Lord " — and distinctly sets 
them aside as no longer binding. Now we must 
never forget that if the Bible is a revelation at all 
it is a progressive revelation ; and that the teaching 
which was adequate for the earlier stages is alto- 
gether inadequate to the moral needs of the present 
day. 

Such are a few of the evidences that the trea- 
sure of divine revelation is conveyed to us in an 
earthen vessel ; that the word of God is mediated 
through the minds and the lips of imperfect men. 
That Moses and Samuel and David and Jeremiah 
and James and John and Paul are imperfect men 
we know very well ; they do not hide from us their 
imperfections ; their misconceptions, their faults of 
character, are distinctly revealed to us ; yet they 
were men of God, messengers of God, every one 
of them ; and they have something to say to us to 
which we ought to give diligent heed. We have 
not the slightest reason for supposing that the 
words which they wrote were any more infallible 
than their characters or their actions; but as there 
is not one of them to whom, if he were alive to-day, 
we would not confidently go for counsel respecting 
the good life, so there is not one of them whose 
written words are not profitable for doctrine, for 
reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteous- 
ness. 



WHAT IS THE BIBLE? 77 

But I can imagine that some one maybe saying, 
" If all this is true, then the Bible is no more than 
any other book." No ; that does not follow. Be- 
tween the two statements, " literally and verbally 
infallible " and " no more than any other book," 
there is a long distance, and one can be far from 
the first without being anywhere near the second. 
It is the defect of a certain variety of untrained 
intellect, that it can think of only two statements 
which can be made about any question, the one of 
which shall be the exact antithesis of the other. 
Persons of this order of mind always instantly 
assume that if you are not a prohibitionist you 
must be a rumseller or in the secret pay of the 
rumsellers ; that if you do not believe in the West- 
minster Confession you must be a blatant infidel ; 
or that if you are not willing to engage in the per- 
secution of Roman Catholics you are undoubtedly 
a Jesuit yourself. There is a vast amount of this 
kind of logic abroad in the world ; it is the logic 
of a childish intellect ; I trust that most of those 
who are reading this are too well educated to be 
influenced by it. One may refuse to accept the 
traditional view of the Bible and still be very far 
from saying that it is no more to him than any 
other book. 

Other books there are, the Bibles of other races, 
of which I could never speak but with the utmost 
respect. That God has revealed some portion of 
his truth to great teachers of other religions I do 
profoundly believe. " I cannot bring myself," 



78 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

says a distinguished Protestant theologian of Eng- 
land, — "I cannot bring myself, and there is no- 
thing in the history of Christianity to compel me 
to bring myself, to divide religions absolutely 
into true and false. From the first days of Chris- 
tian teaching down to our own, there has not been 
wantinof a succession of men who have seen and 
rejoiced in the elements of good in creeds which 
we have not subscribed. Take a phenomenon like 
the Oracle at Delphi ; take that most touching 
account which Plato gives of the Sat/xoVtoi/ of Soc- 
rates ; take the teaching of Gautama (Buddha) ; 
analyze the character of Mahomet ; shall we say 
that there is no spark of heaven in all these ? As- 
suredly there are sparks from heaven ; assuredly 
there are seeds of the divine word (o-Trep/xara tov 
Aoyos) ; assuredly there were, as Justin Martyr 
recognized, ' Christians before Christ ; ' assuredly 
even now there are ' heathen who are not hea- 
then,' — '' 7iot my people^ who shall be called ^ my 
people,'^ and ' not beloved ' who shall be called 
\ beloved. ' '' I do not mean to forget these, nor 
to fail to thank God devoutly for all of his truth 
that He has made known to them. Nor do I hesi- 
tate to recognize the quality of inspiration in many 
great and good books of the present day. And 
yet to me the Bible is not like any other book ; it 
stands in a class by itself, apart from and above 
all other books, worthy of a reverence and a love 
which I can give to no other book. There are 
more reasons than one why this is so ; let me name 
one or two. 



WHAT IS THE BIBLE? 79 

When I travel backward over the course of 
modern history, and trace to their source those 
ideas and those influences of our modern civiliza- 
tion which are most beautiful, most powerful, most 
benign, I find them leading me back to a great 
Character, a unique Personality, who was living in 
Palestine about nineteen hundred years ago. Phi- 
losophize as I will, make due account as I must of 
all the physical and the political forces that have 
been in motion through this period, it still remains 
true that the ideas and the sentiments and the 
influences which emanated directly from Jesus of 
Nazareth have had more to do with all that is best 
in modern history than all other forces put to- 
gether. Do not take my word for this. Some of 
you know what Mr. Benjamin Kidd says about it, 
but I will not quote him. Let me call instead, as 
my witness, Mr. Bernard Bosanquet of Oxford, one 
of the keenest-witted men now living, and a man 
who is connected with the religious radicals of 
England. The address from which I shall quote 
was delivered before one of the Ethical Societies 
of London, a society which rejects the name of 
Christian : — 

" It is true and cannot but be true, because the 
religion is the man, that Christianity was fitted to 
become and has become the definite and specific 
expression of the character of those races which 
down to the present day have been the history- 
making races of the world. 

" The spirit of Christendom then — parodied by 



80 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

its doctrines, but always animating its life — and 
the modern spirit are on the whole convertible 
terms ; and when we speak of culture, humanity, 
civilization, as indicating moral aims and duties, 
we use these terms in the sense practically defined 
for us by the mind of Christendom. . . . The spirit 
of Christendom is, on the one hand, the motor force 
of human progress, and on the other hand the fun- 
damental impulse of the new departure at the time 
of the Christian era." ^ 

The spirit of Christendom is, assuredly, the 
spirit of Christ. All that is most distinctive and 
most beneficent and most glorious in the life of the 
world to-day is vitally related to him. 

Now here is a book that tells me all that I know 
about this Jesus of Nazareth, about his life, his 
teachings, his death ; a book which shows me the 
streams of regenerating influence beginning to flow 
out, through the lives that he vitalized, from the 
little land of Palestine to the other nations ; which 
reveals to me his star of empire taking its way 
westward, over the glad mountain tops of Syria 
and Asia Minor, through the classic lands of 
Greece, to the seven hills of the Eternal City, — a 
path of light that widens and glows through the 
centuries, and that shall shine more and more, till 
the earth shall be filled with his glory. And when 
I take up that Book which contains the record of 
this Life and study it carefully, I find that through 
all the earlier history which it records, through all 

^ The Civilization of Christendom, pp. 71-73. 



WHAT IS THE BIBLE? 81 

the crude and semi-savage periods of patriarclis 
and judges and the turbulent times of kings and 
prophets, there run converging lines of prophecy 
and promise which culminate in him. Certain it 
is that this Jesus is, more than any other, the cen- 
tral figure, the central force, of modern history. 
And here is the Book which tells me what I know 
about him. Is there any other book which has, 
which can have, for me a value to be compared 
with that which I must set upon this Book? It 
seems to me that no man can claim to be fairly 
intelligent who does not diligently study this 
Book and find out for himself what the ideas and 
the influences are which are regenerating the 
world. 

But this Book has another and a deeper interest 
for me than that which is merely historical or sci- 
entific. It shows me the forces that are regenerat- 
ing the world, but it tells me also some things that 
I greatly need to know about myself. The spirit 
that speaks through it bears witness to my spirit 
that I have many needs which things seen and tem- 
poral do not supply. 

I need forgiveness. I have been disloyal to the 
impulses which summon me to seek the highest 
good, and I know that behind those impulses is 
Some One, to whom in spirit I am kindred, who 
has a right to command me. That sense of un- 
worthiness is not easily placated ; how can I find 
peace ? 

I need strength. The infirm will, the wavering 



82 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

mind, are my constant bane and torment ; how can 
I find power ? 

I need wisdom. The way of life is dim and 
devious ; the questions that I must solve are per- 
plexing : how shall I find the light ? 

I need hope and courage. Often I am sore 
bestead ; the foes are many ; the helpers few and 
cowardly ; my heart sinks within me ; who will lift 
up my head ? 

I need comfort. Dark days come ; great griefs 
lay their heavy hands upon me ; voices that my 
heart stood still to hear are silent forever ; I stand 
in the gathering mist alone and dumb ; who will 
help me bear my burden ? I need the assurance 
of life eternal. In my path, also, waits the Shadow 
feared of men. Not many days hence I shall meet 
him and I shall not say him nay. The realities of 
the life beyond — who can tell me about them ? 

These are, surely, the deepest needs of my life. 
Who can supply them ? Where can I find the an- 
swer to all these questions ? I believe that I find 
them answered in this Book more fully, more per- 
fectly, more convincingly, than anywhere else in the 
world. I believe that He in whom the promise 
and the prophecy of this Book culminate, and who 
is called, and rightly called, the Prince of Life 
and the Light of the World, has a clear and satisfy- 
ing answer to give to all these questions. And if 
you and I go to the Book with these questions up- 
permost in our thought, not to cavil, nor to criti- 
cise, but wishing for peace and power and wisdom 



WHAT IS THE BIBLE? 83 

and courage and comfort and promise of the life to 
come, with open mind receiving the influences it is 
fitted to impart, — we shall find, what countless 
millions have found, that it is able to make us wise 
unto salvation, through faith which is in Christ 
Jesus. 



IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL? 

The question of this chapter would undoubtedly 
have been answered by any old Hebrew, of the 
days before the exile, by an emphatic negative. 
He knew of no such personality. Neither Abra- 
ham, nor Moses, nor Samuel, nor David, nor 
Isaiah, nor Jeremiah, nor any of the earlier pro- 
phets had ever heard of such a potentate. We 
infer that he was unknown to all these worthies 
because none of them mentions him. Devil with 
the definite article, as signifying the Prince of 
Darkness, does not occur in the Old Testament. 
" Devils," in the plural, is found four times in the 
old version of the Hebrew scriptures. In two of 
these cases it is a palpable and ridiculous mistrans- 
lation ; the new version properly renders the 
Hebrew word " he-goats." The reference is to the 
unlawful worship of that animal. In the other 
two cases the new version substitutes " demons," 
so that we may say that the word devil is not found 
in the new version of the Old Testament. 

Satan, however, is mentioned in four places. In 
one of them, the one hundred and ninth Psalm, the 
new version substitutes '' adversary." It is one of 



IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL? 85 

those imprecatory psalms, in whicli the writer is 
wishing all sorts of harm to his enemy ; and he 
hopes that he may be brought to a speedy trial 
with a wicked judge over him, and an adversary 
or accuser at his right hand. The Hebrew word 
Satan means adversary ; and of course the psalm- 
ist's reference here is to some accusing man and 
not to any evil spirit. 

In the twenty-first chapter of First Chronicles 
we are told that Satan provoked David to number 
Israel. In the Second Book of Samuel we have a 
much earlier account of the same transaction, in 
which it is said that the Lord himself, being angry 
with Israel, instigated David to do this thing. 
The Book of the prophet Zechariah mentions Satan 
as an enemy or accuser of the good priest Joshua, 
and in the Book of Job he is also introduced as the 
accuser of the chief personage of that drama. 

Respecting the Chronicles and the Book of Zech- 
ariah, we know that they were written after the 
exile ; and it is not impossible that Job belongs 
to the same period. If we were sure of this, we 
should have a very clear account of the origin of 
the belief in Satan so far as the Hebrews are con- 
cerned. The fact being that no reference to such 
an evil potentate is found in any of the writings 
preceding the exile, and that the people among 
whom they were sojourning during the exile pos- 
sessed a very highly developed religious faith, in 
which the existence of an evil deity was a cardinal 
doctrine, it seems clear that the Hebrews borrowed 



86 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

from the Persians their belief in such a personage. 
It is probable, however, that some elements of a 
dark superstition did find entrance to their minds 
in the early days ; and that those two references to 
demons, to which I have alluded, indicate their 
fear of some mysterious powers, inhabiting waste 
places, and threatening their peace. The mono- 
theism of the old Hebrews was, however, of so posi- 
tive a character, that no room was found in their 
minds for any rival deity, bad or good. The Satan 
of the Book of Job, whatever date we may give 
the book, is not the prince of a hostile dominion ; 
he is one of the sons of God ; apparently he is a 
sort of prosecuting attorney whose business it is to 
find out evil deeds and report them. Naturally he 
takes a pessimistic view of human character, but 
the view appears to be purely professional. The 
evil which he inflicts on Job is permitted by Jeho- 
vah, as a test of Job's integrity. There is nothing 
in the character of Satan as it appears in this book 
to suggest the gigantic and malignant personality 
of the later theology. 

The Serpent which tempted Eve has been popu- 
larly identified with Satan or the devil, but there 
is not one word in the narrative which susfo^ests 
any such thing. He is simply called a serpent ; he 
is said to have been one of the beasts of the field, 
the most cunning of them all. The only scriptural 
warrant for the belief that the tempter of Eve was 
the devil, in the form of a serpent, is found in two 
places in the Apocalypse, when " that old Serpent, 



IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL? 87 

the devil and Satan " is mentioned. Xo reference 
is made to Eve or lier temptation ; it is only by a 
doubtful inference that the Serpent of Eden can 
be identified with the one mentioned in the Apoca- 
lypse. And it is perfectly certain that the writer 
of the narrative in Genesis did not intend to de- 
scribe, under the designation of the Serpent, any 
such personage as the later theology has created 
and named Apollyon or Beelzebub. That person- 
age, I say, was not known nor imagined by any of 
the Hebrew prophets, kings, or lawgivers, before 
the Babylonian exile. But when the people came 
back from that exile they brought with them the 
germs of a demonology which mightily affected 
their after belief. Here we see some traces of 
that aherglauhe whose invasion Matthew Arnold 
traces in the religion of Israel. 

The Dualism of the Persians and the Medians 
which the Jews thus borrowed would well repay a 
careful study ; I have time only to allude to it. 
Rawlinson tells us that the original Zoroastrianism, 
like the original form of the Jews' religion, was 
not dualistic. The Persians first believed in " a 
single great Intelligence, Ahuro-Mazdao, the high- 
est object of adoration, the true Creator, preserver, 
and governor of the universe. This is its great 
glory. It sets before the soul a single Being as the 
source of all good and the proper object of the 
highest worship." ^ But the Persians began to try 
to account for the evils in the world ; they let their 
^ Five Great Monarchies^ iii. 96. 



88 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

imagination work upon this problem. " They see," 
says Rawlinson, " everywhere a struggle between 
right and wrong, truth and falsehood, purity and 
impurity ; apparently they are blind to the evi- 
dence of harmony and agreement in the universe, 
discerning nothing anywhere but strife, conflict, 
antagonism. Nor is this all. They go a step fur- 
ther, and personify the two parties to the struggle. 
One is a ' white ' or holy ' spirit,' and the other a 
dark spirit (angro-mainyus). But this personi- 
fication is merely poetical or metaphorical. The 
' white s]3irit 'is not Ahura-Mazda, and the ' dark 
spirit ' is not a hostile intelligence. Both resolve 
themselves on examination into mere figures of 
speech, phantoms of poetic imagery, abstract no- 
tions, clothed by language with an apparent, not 
a real personality. 

" It was natural that, as time went on. Dualism 
should develop itself out of the primitive Zoro- 
astrianism. Language exercises a tyranny over 
thought, and abstractions in the ancient world were 
ever becoming persons. The Iranian mind, more- 
over, had been struck, when it first turned to con- 
template the world, with a certain antagonism ; 
and, having once entered the track, it would be 
compelled to go on, and seek to discover the origin 
of the antagonism, the cause or causes to which it 
was to be ascribed. Evil seemed most easily ac- 
counted for by the supposition of an evil Person ; 
and the continuance of an equal struggle, without 
advantage to either side, which was what the Ira- 



IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL? 89 

nians thought they beheld in the world that lay- 
around them, appeared to them to imply the equal- 
ity of that evil Person with the Being whom they 
rightly regarded as the author of all good. Thus 
Dualism had its birth. The Iranians came to be- 
lieve in the existence of two coeternal and coequal 
persons, between whom there had been from all 
eternity a perpetual and never-ceasing conflict, and 
between whom the same conflict would continue to 
rage through all coming time." ^ 

It was thus that the belief in Angro-Mainyus, 
or Ahriman, — the black spirit, — was developed 
among this ancient people. And the Persian the- 
ology thenceforward set these two potentates of good 
and evil over against each other in an eternal con- 
flict. " Whatever good work Ahura-Mazda in his 
benevolence creates, Angro-Mainyus steps forward 
to mar and blast it. If Ahura-Mazda forms a ' de- 
licious spot ' in a world previously desert and un- 
inhabitable, to become the first home of his favor- 
ites, Angro-Mainyus ruins it by sending into it a 
poisonous serpent, and at the same time rendering 
the climate one of the bitterest severity. If Ahura- 
Mazda provides, instead of this blasted region, ' the 
second best of regions and countries,' Angro- 
Mainyus sends there the curse of murrain, fatal to 
all cattle. In every land which Ahura-Mazda cre- 
ates for his worshipers, Angro-Mainyus immedi- 
ately assigns some plague or other. War, ravages, 
sickness, fever, poverty, hail, earthquakes, buzzing 

1 Five Great Monarchies, iii. 105, 106. 



90 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

insects, poisonous plants, unbelief, witchcraft, and 
other inexpiable sins are introduced by him into 
the various happy regions created without any such 
draw^backs by the good spirit ; and a world which 
should have been ' very good ' is by these means 
converted into a scene of trial and suffering." ^ 

It is evident, now, I think, whence came the mighty 
Prince and Potentate of Evil who has had so large 
a part to play in later Jewish and Christian theo- 
logy. We have tracked him to his lair. The rela- 
tion between these Persians and the Israelites, while 
the latter dwelt among them, was very close and 
sympathetic ; the Israelites absorbed from them 
the idea of a Kingdom of Evil arrayed against the 
Kingdom of Jehovah, and it became a part of their 
system of belief. They modified it, however, very 
materially. Their Satan never became so power- 
ful a personage as the Persian Angro-Mainyus. His 
dominion was always inferior and his power greatly 
limited. Yet he was able to do a great deal of mis- 
chief in the world : and they conceived of him as 
the sovereign of a bad realm, whose messengers 
and emissaries were always at work tormenting hu- 
man beings and exercising their diabolical power 
in many injurious ways. Such was the common 
belief of the Jews when our Lord was on the earth. 
His relation to this belief we wiU consider a little 
later ; we are only trying now to trace its historical 
development among the Jews. Having adopted 
this new Potentate into their pantheon, the Jewish 

1 Five Great Monarchies, iii. 107, 108. 



IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL? 91 

theologians had to account for him. Who was he, 
and how came he into this state of hostility to the 
good God ? They finally made out that he was a 
fallen angel. There is not a word in the old Tes- 
tament or in the Gospels or the Acts of the Apostles 
or the Epistles about this : the first hint of it, and it 
is very slight, is in the twelfth chapter of the Re- 
velation, where we read of a war in heaven between 
Michael and his angels, on the one hand, and the 
dragon, otherwise the old serpent, sometimes called 
the Devil and Satan, and his angels on the other ; 
the result of which was the defeat of the dragon 
and his followers, who were cast out of heaven, and 
fell to the earth. This apocalyptical writing, whose 
language is confessedly highly symbolical, fur- 
nishes all the biography of the Devil that the Bible 
contains. The biblical materials for a history of 
the Devil are, it must be owned, extremely meagre. 
But there were a number of apocryphal writings, 
appearing about this time, in which the informa- 
tion is more specific. And whatever may have 
been believed by the apostles concerning this Prince 
of Darkness, the early church soon began to de- 
velop the doctrine of the Devil, and it was not 
many centuries before an elaborate system of belief 
concerning him had been evolved from the imagi- 
nations of Christian teachers. " Holding firmly," 
says one authority, " to the belief of a Satanic 
Kingdom of darkness opposed to Christ's Kingdom 
of light, the majority of the early Christians as- 
cribed all evil, physical as well as moral, to the 



92 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

Devil and liis demons, — failures of the crop, steril- 
ity, pestilence, murrain among cattle, mental mala- 
dies, persecutions of the Christians, individual vices, 
heresies, astrology, philosophy, and finally the whole 
body of heathenism, with its mythology and reli- 
gious worship. The heathen gods were believed to 
be conquered by the work of Christ, but not to be 
wholly powerless ; they sank down into demons, 
and so a part of their mythology passed into the 
doctrine of the Devil." 

Thus the Satanic cult, if we may so describe it, 
was thoroughly planted in Christian theology. 
Strong tendencies appeared, like those of the Gnos- 
tics and the Manichseans, to a dualism as unqual- 
ified as that of the Parsees, in which the Kingdom 
of Evil was made coeternal with the Kingdom of 
Good ; but these tendencies were resisted ; Satan 
was not admitted to be equal in power with the 
Lord God ; his kingdom was not from everlasting 
to everlasting ; defeat and final overthrow were in 
store for him ; but for the present he was a tremen- 
dous fact, and a large part of the time and thought 
of the church was expended in tracing and sub- 
verting diabolic agencies. " The whole world," 
says Mr. Lecky, " was divided between the King- 
dom of God and the Kingdom of Satan. The 
persecuted church represented the first, the perse- 
cuting world the second. In every scoff that was 
directed against their creed, in every edict that 
menaced their persons, in every interest that opposed 
their progress, they perceived the direct and imme- 



IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL? 93 

diate action of tlie Devil. They found a great and 
ancient religion subsisting around tliem. Its gor- 
geous rites, its traditions, its priests, and its mira- 
cles had preoccupied the public mind, and pre- 
sented what seemed at first an insuperable barrier 
to their mission. In this religion they saw the 
especial workmanship of the Devil, and their 
strong predisposition to interpret every event by a 
miraculous standard persuaded them that all its 
boasted prodigies were real. Nor did they find any 
difficulty in explaining them. The world they 
believed to be full of malignant demons who had 
in aU ages persecuted and deluded mankind." ^ 

It is terrible to read of the extent to which, for 
many centuries, the thought of the church was per- 
vaded by these conceptions of diabolic agency. A 
large share of natural phenomena was attributed to 
the Devil : he was supposed to assume the forms 
of all kinds of animals ; the pig grunting at you 
by the roadside, the toad hopping across your path, 
the blackbird chattering at you from the thicket, 
the beetle booming into your room after the lamp 
was'lighted, were very probably shapes of the Devil. 
All human forms, from the priest in his cassock to 
the gallant with his sword, from the wizened 
granddame to the blooming maiden, he could eas- 
ily assume ; any traveling companion who joined 
you in a solitary walk was very likely the Devil ; 
all lonely places were haunted by him ; even in the 
crowded streets he moved undetected, and in the 
1 History of Rationalism in Europe, chap. i. 



94 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

homes of men he took up his abode. During sev- 
eral of the middle centuries, from the fifth to the 
twelfth, the sense of his presence was scarcely 
absent from the minds of the devout ; but in that 
happy time, Mr. Lecky tells us, although there 
had never been a day " in which the sense of Sa- 
tanic power was more profound and universal," 
the counteracting superstition, connected with the 
efficacy of certain magical rites, was also so strong 
that not much distress was felt on this account. 
" It was firmly believed that the arch-fiend was 
forever hovering about the Christian, but it was 
also believed that the sign of the cross, or a few 
drops of holy water, or the name of Mary, could 
put him to an immediate and ignominious flight." ^ 
There was, however, even then, a dark belief that 
all the terrible natural phenomena — earthquakes, 
thunderstorms, hailstorms, pestilences, famines — 
were produced by the Devil ; even when the Pil- 
grim Fathers settled in Plymouth, they attributed 
the severe thunderstorms, to which they were un- 
accustomed, to the wrath of the Devil at their inva- 
sion of his territory. The Black Death which 
slew so many victims during the Middle Ages was 
universally believed to be a diabolic visitation. 

Then it came to be believed that these disasters 
were often due to the intervention of men who had 
put themselves into the power of the Devil, and so 
arose the horrible belief in witchcraft and sorcery 
which for many generations came near to being 
^ History of Rationalism in Europe, chap. i. 



IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL? 95 

a demoniac possession of those who believed it. 
Cruel and terrible was this superstition ; in every 
community were those who were said to have sold 
themselves to the Devil, and to be the willing in- 
struments of his malignity. Thus was let loose, 
all round the world, a truly hellish suspicion ; any 
slight mental or nervous peculiarity exposed its 
possessor to this deadly accusation ; personal jeal- 
ousies and enmities seized upon this superstition 
for a weapon, and the fiery zeal of a religionism 
that had no doubt whatever of the reality and per- 
vasiveness of the Satanic kingdom found vent in 
a reigTi of terror that lasted for centuries. We 
often hear of the Salem witchcraft and its victims, 
and I dare say there are many who conceive that 
our New England ancestors were singular in their 
subjection to this craze. Doubtless we all regret 
that the men of Massachusetts Bay were not supe- 
rior to this mania, but if they had been, they would 
have been wholly exceptional in their generation. 
In our colonies twenty-seven persons in all suffered 
death as witches ; in Europe they were put to death 
by thousands. " The zeal of the ecclesiastics," 
says Mr. Lecky, "in stimulating the persecution, 
was unflagging. It was displayed alike in Ger- 
many, France, Spain, Italy, Flanders, Sweden, 
England, Scotland, and Ireland. An old writer 
who cordially approved of the rigor tells us that 
in the Province of Como alone eight or ten inquisi- 
tors were constantly employed ; and he adds that 
in one year the number of persons they condemned 



96 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

amounted to a thousand, and that during several 
of the succeeding years the victims seldom fell 
below one hundred." ^ I must give you one more 
sketch from the pen of Professor Burr of Cornell 
University: "The Eeformation for a little while 
distracted men's minds, but with its first lull, at 
the middle of the sixteenth century, the persecu- 
tion burst forth with redoubled furj in all Chris- 
tian lands. Catholic and Protestant alike, to rage 
for more than a century, and then smoulder to our 
own day. The figures given for the total number 
of its victims are merest guesswork, and those for 
many local persecutions are scarcely more reliable ; 
but they are as likely to be below as above the 
truth. We have the names of hundreds who per- 
ished in single jurisdictions within the space of two 
or three years : and the records thus preserved are 
but chance fragments. A single Lorraine judge 
boasted of having sentenced nine hundred, and he 
was still in the midst of his activity. If the per- 
secution knew fiercer epidemics in Catholic coun- 
tries it was more chronic in Protestant. Nor was 
it mainly old women who suffered. Such might be 
accused first, but the witch was always tortured 
into naming her accomplices, and she generally 
named those whom she hated or envied. Eiches, 
learning, beauty, goodness were often so many 
titles to death. ' There are still,' wrote the Chan- 
cellor of the Bishop of Wiirzburg to a friend in 
1629, ' four hundred in the city, high and low, of 
^ History of Nationalism in Europe, cliap. i. 



IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL? 97 

every rank and sex, nay, even clerics, so strongly 
accused that they may be arrested at any hour. 
Some out of all offices and faculties must be ex- 
ecuted ; clerics, electoral counselors and electors, 
city officials, court assessors, several of whom your 
Grace knows. There are law students to be ar- 
rested. The Prince-Bishop has over forty students 
who are soon to be pastors ; among them thirteen 
or fourteen are said to be witches. A few days 
ago a dean was arrested ; two others who were 
summoned have fled. The notary of our church 
consistory, a very learned man, was yesterday ar- 
rested and put to the torture. In a word, a third 
part of the city is surely involved. The richest, 
most attractive, most prominent of the clergy are 
already executed. A week ago a maiden of nine- 
teen was put to death, of whom it is everywhere 
said that she was the fairest in the whole city, and 
was held by everybody a girl of singular modesty 
and purity. She will be followed by seven or 
eight others, of the best and most winsome. There 
are children of three and four years, to the num- 
ber of three hundred, who are said to have had 
intercourse with the Devil. I have seen put to 
death childx'en of seven, promising students of ten, 
twelve, fourteen, and fifteen. Of the nobler — but 
I cannot and must not write more of this misery. 
There are persons of yet higher rank whom you 
know and would marvel to hear of.' Such, to 
quote but a single document, was the scope of the 
witch persecution." ^ 

1 Johnson's Cydopcedia, art. " Witchcraft." 



98 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

To the yoke of this horrible superstition all the 
greatest and best of mankind bent their necks. 
Luther's belief in the Devil and in witchcraft was 
unhesitating. As for the witches, he had no mercy 
on them. " Spare none of them," he cried ; " I 
would burn them all." The question respecting 
the certainty of detecting them did not trouble his 
mind ; it was easy enough, of course, to tell who 
was a witch and who was not. As to the existence 
of the Devil, Luther was just as certain as he was 
of his own existence. He had met him more than 
once, and had had lively conversations with him. 
"Early this morning," he writes in his diary, 
" when I awoke the fiend came and began disput- 
ing with me. ' Thou art a great sinner,' said he. 
I replied, ' Canst thou not tell me something new, 
Satan ? ' " It is evident that in repartee his Satanic 
Majesty was no match for Martin. Even when it 
came to inkstands his answer was ready. One 
day as he was going to begin his studies he heard 
a noise which he at once explained as proceeding 
from the adversary, and he writes : "As I found 
he was about to begin again I gathered together 
my books and got into bed. Another time in the 
night I heard him above my cell walking in the 
cloister, but as I knew it was the Devil I paid no 
attention to him and went to sleep." 

Do not imagine that it was the church and the 
clergy who were solely responsible for this super- 
stition ; the greatest jurists, publicists, scholars, 
statesmen all passionately defended it. " Thomas 



IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL? 99 

Aquinas," says Lecky, " was probably the ablest 
writer of the eighteenth century, and he assures us 
that diseases and tempests are the direct acts of the 
Devil ; that the Devil can transport men at his 
pleasure through the air, and that he can transform 
them into any shape. Gerson, the Chancellor of 
the University of Paris and, as many think, the 
author of ' The Imitation,' is justly regarded as 
one of the master intellects of his age; and he, 
too, wrote in defense of the belief. Bodin was 
unquestionably the most original political philoso- 
pher who had arisen since Machiavelli, and he 
devoted all his learning and acuteness to crushing 
the rising skepticism on the subject of witches." ^ 
The most cruel law for the punishment of witches 
passed by the English Parliament was enacted 
when Coke was attorney general and Bacon was 
a member of Parliament; the Commission which 
reported it included twelve Bishops. Sir Thomas 
Browne, one of the liberals of that day, and one of 
the most genial and cultivated gentlemen of his- 
tory, wrote in the " Religio Medici," " I have ever 
believed and do now know that there are witches ; 
they that deny them . . . -are a sort, not of in- 
fidels, but of atheists." In 1664 two women were 
hung in Suffolk under a sentence of Sir Matthew 
Hale, whose charge to the jury declared that the 
reality of witchcraft could not be questioned; 
" for, first, the Scriptures had affirmed so much ; 
and, secondly, the wisdom of all nations had pro- 

1 Hist. Bationalism, chap. i. 



100 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

vided laws against sucli persons, which is an argu- 
ment of their confidence of such a crime." 

Such, then, is a most meagre sketch of the pre- 
valence of the dark belief in the kingdom of Satan. 
The earth has been visited by few scourges more 
dire. The cruelty and perfidy, the malice and 
suspicion which it engendered, the destruction and 
misery which it caused, are almost too fearful for 
credence. If we know beliefs, as we know men, 
by their fruits, — and there is no other test, — this 
belief in a Satanic kingdom must be adjudged to 
be most qyH and accursed. 

Can we say that it has disappeared from the 
Christian church ? That would be too strong a 
statement. It is clear, however, that the place 
which it occupies in the thoughts of Christians is 
not what it was three hundred years ago. The belief 
in witchcraft has practically vanished from civili- 
zation. The last witch was burned in Scotland in 
1722 ; and although, as late as 1773, " the divines 
of the Associated Presbytery " passed a resolution 
declaring their belief in witchcraft, and deploring 
the popular skepticism concerning it ; and although 
John Wesley, a little more than one hundred years 
ago, said that those who doubted witchcraft were 
tainted with infidelity, and that if this belief was 
overthrown Christianity would go with it, it seems 
to be true that witchcraft is dead, and that Chris- 
tianity is still very much alive. 

Some sort of belief in a personal Devil is still 
common, I suppose, among Orthodox Christians. 



IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL? 101 

It can hardly be said to be an article of faith : this 
it has never been. None of the three great creeds 
of the church — the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene 
Creed, or the Athanasian Creed — makes mention 
of the Devil ; he is referred to incidentally, in some 
of the great Protestant confessions, but I do not 
remember that any of them have undertaken to 
define him, or to formulate any belief concerning 
him. The brief survey which we have given of 
the part that the belief has played in the history 
of the church enables us, however, to state, in a 
general way, what the popular conception of Satan 
has been. 

The Orthodox belief has regarded him as the 
sovereign of a vast, world-wide dominion of evil 
spirits, who are banded together, under him, to do 
his bad behests. These spirits and their great 
Prince have but one purpose, to hurt and harass 
and ruin men, body and soul. Their home is 
hell; but under the orders of their great Prince 
they are sent forth to range free through the earth, 
tempting human beings and seeking to draw them 
down to the place of eternal torment. 

All these evil spirits have great power over na- 
ture, — power to work miracles, it would seem ; to 
transport themselves instantaneously from place to 
place, and to assume manifold forms. But the 
prince of them all, the personal Devil, of the popu- 
lar theology, must be practically omnipotent. He 
produces earthquakes, plagues, famines, hurricanes, 
eclipses ; his miraculous control of natural forces is 



102 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

practically unlimited. And he must also be omni- 
present. At one and the same instant he is tempt- 
ing men in every quarter of the globe ; his diaboli- 
cal intelligence is in immediate contact with the 
minds of men everywhere. I am sure that this is 
distinctly implied in the popular belief concerning 
him. Unless Satan is actually omnipresent, his 
influence over the minds of human beings cannot 
be what it is popularly supposed to be. If he can 
only be in one place at a time, and must pass, no 
matter with what rapidity, from one place to an- 
other in pursuit of his malignant purposes, it is 
but an infinitesimal fraction of any generation that 
he can by any possibility reach in the course of its 
life. That would not at all answer the popular 
demand upon him for " pernicious activity." No- 
thing less than omnipresence, and nothing less than 
omniscience, could possibly equip Satan for the 
kind of work which he is generally believed to be 
doing. 

Do we believe in the existence of such a king- 
dom of evil, with such a potentate as this at the 
head of it ? 

Most of us will say at once that the belief once 
entertained in the power of the Devil over the 
forces of nature can no longer be justified : it is 
not, we shall all admit, credible that earthquakes 
and eclipses and pestilences are caused by him. 
We know something of the causes of these phe- 
nomena. But there are still a good many per- 
sons, I suppose, who believe him to possess a great 



IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL? 103 

deal of power, and to be performing a great deal of 
mischief in the world in many mysterious ways. 

To all such, let me suggest that these concep- 
tions about him ought, if possible, to be less vague. 
If there is such a Prince of Evil, we ought to know 
more about him ; we ought to be able to tell, more 
definitely, what is his power and what are his lim- 
itations. We do not want to be ascribing to him 
attributes that make him a deity scarcely subordi- 
nate to God himself, unless they really belong to 
him. And those who esteem it important that 
belief in the existence of this Prince of Darkness 
should be maintained, are bound, I think, to tell 
us very definitely just how much we are to believe 
about him. 

For my own part I am quite free to say that I 
do not believe in the existence of any such organ- 
ized kingdom of evil spirits, ruled by a great Prince 
or Potentate, and set in deadly array against the 
Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. If you 
mean by a personal Devil a gigantic evil intelli- 
gence whose sole purpose in the universe is the 
destruction of men's souls, and who commands vast 
armies of evil spirits in an age-long warfare upon 
human virtue and human happiness, then I say I 
do not believe in a personal Devil. The concep- 
tion of such a personage, so far as this age is con- 
cerned, is largely taken from Paradise Lost. I 
suppose that the conceptions of Satan which pre- 
vail in our Protestant churches have nearly all been 
drawn from this source. It is weU to remember 



104 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

that Paradise Lost is a great work of the imagina- 
tion. Milton's picture of this stupendous Prince of 
Darkness is not a good foundation of theological 
belief. 

.1 do not believe in the existence of such a king- 
dom, with such a ruler, because it is morally and 
psychologically impossible that it should exist. 
Unrelieved and absolute evil cannot organize it- 
self into a kingdom. Its very principle is division 
and disintegration. Its essence is anarchy. " Sin 
is lawlessness," says the apostle. The mightiest 
intellect that ever existed could not hold together 
for- one week such an aggregation of absolute self- 
ishness. Every one of his minions would be per- 
petually conspiring against him, and against all 
the rest. 

What is more, the whole effect of evil upon the 
intellect is benumbing, deadening. Selfishness 
weakens a man's mental grasp and narrows his 
range of vision. A politician who is nothing but 
a selfish schemer always becomes less astute as he 
grows older. He is morally sure, before he dies, 
to make some stupendous blunder which even a 
tyro would have avoided. The history of our poli- 
tics furnishes many instances of such intellectual 
failure on the part of men who were known to be 
utterly selfish, but supposed to be preternaturally 
shrewd. If, then, Satan had been for so many cen- 
turies devoted to such pursuits as are ascribed to 
him, he would, unless God had set aside in his 
behalf the natural working of his own laws, have 



IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL? 105 

been an absolute idiot long before tbis, and so 
would all bis angels. If tbe Devil is one of God's 
creatures, tbe law under wbicb be was cr-eated 
must be tbe law of love. Tliat is tbe law of bis 
being, tbe organic law of bis spirit. His sin is 
only disobedience to tbat law. Disobedience to 
tbat law, in any part of tbis universe, brings after 
it, as tbe natural effect, intellectual as well as 
moral deterioration, weakness, — tbe diminution of 
being. Tbe operation of tbat law absolutely forbids 
and makes absurd tbe existence of any sucb gigan- 
tic Prince of Darkness as Milton bas painted. 
Tbe Bible rigbtly calls tbe sinner tbe fool;. and 
tbe longer be sins tbe greater fool be is. If 
tbere is a Devil, one wbo bas sinned longer and 
more persistently tban any otber of God's crea- 
tures, be must be tbe greatest fool in tbe universe, 
and we need not be at all afraid of bim. 

In tbe second place I do not believe in tbe exist- 
ence of sucb a gigantic world dominion of evil 
spirits witb sucb a ruler, because I believe all tbat 
Jesus Cbrist bas taugbt us to believe concerning tbe 
Heavenly Fatber. Tbat tbe InjQnite Power bebind 
all law is infinite compassion and infinite belpful- 
ness is tbe first article in my creed, and witb tbis 
everytbing else must agree. If there is a good 
God, be bas not let loose in tbe world sucb a 
migbty bost of malignant spirits, witb sucb a gi- 
gantic malefactor at tbe bead of tbem, to prey 
upon tbe souls of bis children. 

In tbe tbird place I do not accept tbis tbeory, 



106 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

because history shows us what horrible effects it 
produces in human society where it is generally 
and firmly believed. Restore the belief in Satan 
to the rank and importance that it held in the 
minds of men in the sixteenth century, and you 
will have all the atrocities of that dark day re- 
peated. A belief cannot be true which works such 
devastation in the moral lives of men. 

Is there, then, no sense in which we may use this 
word, so long upon trembling human lips? Is 
there no true conception to which we may properly 
or usefully apply this name ? There is, I an- 
swer, if only we do it intelligently. The word is 
one that I often use, and I think I know what I 
mean by it. It is simply the aggregate spiritual 
wickedness of the world, personified. " Satan, or 
the devil, taken in the singular," says Dr. Bushnell, 
" is not the name of any particular person, neither 
is it a personation of temptation or impersonal 
evil, as many think ; for there is really no such 
thing as impersonal evil in the sense of moral evil ; 
but the name is a name that generalizes bad per- 
sons or spirits, with their bad thoughts and char- 
acters, many in one. That there is any single one 
of them who, by distinction or preeminence, is 
called Satan or devil is wholly improbable. The 
name is one taken up by the imagination to desig- 
nate or embody, in a conception the mind can most 
easily wield, the all or total of bad minds and 
powers." ^ The demon in the New Testament story 

^ Nature and the Supernatural, p. 135. 



IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL? 107 

told the truth when he said, " My name is Legion, 
for we are many." Just so " Mammon " is per- 
sonified in the Scriptures as a ruler of this world. 
He is materialism hypostatized. Just so " The 
Man of Sin " and " Antichrist " are personified 
in the New Testament and the personal pronouns 
are applied to them. Doubtless the terms describe 
no historical individual, but groups or assemblages 
of hostile minds and influences. Just so in the 
Book of Proverbs " Wisdom " is personified, and 
represented as a beautiful matron who seeks by her 
motherly influence to lead the children of men into 
the paths of life. Such personifications, by which 
abstract truths are put into concrete form and vast 
spiritual tendencies are grouped by the imagination 
under one symbolic term, are very useful in our 
common speech. To speak of the sum of moral 
evil in the universe as the Devil is a convenient and 
intelligible locution. In this sense it is the Devil 
that tempts us, that ensnares us, that poisons our 
thoughts, that lies in wait for our souls. And it 
is well for us to gather up the evil of the world into 
one conception, and set ourselves sternly against 
the whole of it. Familiar and colloquial though 
our use of the term may be,' symbolical though we 
know it is, it is very significant. Thomas Carlyle 
was entertaining no superstitious ideas about a per- 
sonal Devil, but he had a most clear and wholesome 
idea in his mind when he wrote to his brother 
John : " One has to learn the hard lesson of mar- 
tyrdom, and that he has arrived in the earth not 



108 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

to receive, but to give. Let him, then, be ready 
to spend and be spent for God's cause ; let him, as 
he needs must, set his face like a flint against all 
dishonesty and indolence and puffery and quackery 
and malice and delusion whereof earth is full ; and 
once for all flatly refuse to do the devil's work in 
this which is God's earth, let the issue be simply 
what it may. ' I must live, sir,' say many ; to 
which I answer, ' No, sir, you need not live ; if 
your body cannot be kept together without selling 
your soul, then let the body fall asunder and the 
soul be unsold.' In brief. Jack, defy the devil in 
all his figures, and spit upon him ; he cannot hurt 

Doubtless the Devil, used in this sense, will have 
different meanings for different men ; but to every 
man it means all the evil that assails him ; all the 
influences that tend to undermine his integrity, to 
lower his moral standards, to poison his thoughts, 
to make him swerve from the path of manliness 
and purity. 

Is it in this sense, you want to know, that the word 
devil is used in the New Testament ? Sometimes 
it is, no doubt. For the Oriental mind personifies 
much more than does the Western mind. Never- 
theless I do not question, as I have already said, 
that the people of Judea in the New Testament 
times — the majority of them — did believe in a 
great kingdom of evil spirits, with Beelzebub, the 
Prince of the Devils, as its ruler. Jesus found this 

1 Froude's Carlyle, ii. 197. 



IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL? 109 

conception in the minds of the people, and he did 
not antagonize it, but accommodated his teachings 
to it. At least this is the impression given by the 
gospel narratives. Assuming that he is correctly 
reported, I find it difficult to explain all his rela- 
tion to this question. The story of the temptation 
does not trouble me, for this is clearly an allegory. 
It is not likely that Jesus was literally carried 
through the air by the devil from the wilderness to 
Jerusalem and set upon a pinnacle of the temple ; 
and it is not possible that he should have been 
taken to any literal mountain from the top of 
which all the kingdoms of the earth can be literally 
seen ; for no such mountain exists, or could exist 
upon the earth. The transaction must have been 
purely spiritual ; it is a dramatic description of a 
conflict in the spirit of Jesus, as the corporate self- 
ishness of the world presents itself to him in the 
three most universal and powerful forms of appe- 
tite, vanity, and ambition. There is no difficulty 
in understanding this narrative. But some of the 
reported words and deeds of Jesus in connection 
with this subject I do not wholly understand. 
What he tells us, however, about the Father and 
his kingdom of righteousness and peace I do under- 
stand, and I build my faith on that. I know that 
this was the main thing that Jesus came to teach ; 
I know that he came to show us the Father ; I 
know that the God whom he reveals to us is the 
Good Shepherd, who follows the estray into the 
wilderness to bring him back, rejoicing more over 



110 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

the sheep that was lost and found again than over 
the ninety and nine that went not astray ; the 
prodigal's father, who meets the returning wan- 
derer a long way off ; the gracious Benefactor, who 
maketh his sun to shine on the evil and the good 
and sendeth his rain on the just and on the unjust. 
Whatever conflicts with this conception of the hea- 
venly Father and his kingdom on the earth, I can 
find no room for in my theology. If there seems 
to be in the teaching of Jesus himself an element 
which I cannot reconcile with this, I think that I 
honor him by passing it by, and waiting for the 
time to come when I may understand him better. 
It is the spirit of Jesus, as I do firmly believe, — 
the spirit of Jesus abiding in the world, and grad- 
ually taking possession of the thoughts of men, 
that is banishing this dreadful dogma from the 
earth. Many things against which he lifted up 
no word of protest, which he silently assumed, 
have been banished from among men by the power 
of his spirit. Slavery was here, in its worst form, 
before his very face ; he never condemned it, but 
he created a moral atmosphere in which it could 
not live. Polygamy he never forbade, but he made 
it impossible. And though the demonology of his 
time was assumed by him, as was slavery and po- 
lygamy, he has brought into the world a conception 
of God and of his kingdom which, when once the 
world is able to receive it, will make an end of all 
this dismal doctrine. Perhaps it was a glimpse of 
this triumph over the Kingdom of Night that he 



IS THERE A PERSONAL DEVIL ? Ill 

saw when he exclaimed : " I beheld Satan as light- 
ning fall from heaven." May God speed the day 
when all these spectral kingdoms of superstition 
and darkness shall disappear in the brightness of 
the glory of Him who comes to lead the world 
into the knowledge of God ! 



VI 

WHAT DO WE mHERIT? 

" What mean ye," is the protest of Jehovah by 
the month of the old prophet, " that ye nse this 
proverb in the land of Israel, saying, The fathers 
have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth 
are set on edge ? As I live, saith the Lord God, 
ye shall not have occasion to use this proverb any 
more in Israel." It would have been well for the 
interests of a sound theology if no occasion had 
been found to use the proverb outside of Israel. 
For, in truth, the very substance of this proverb, 
which the prophet denounces as heathenish, has 
been wrought into theology in Hippo and in Hei- 
delberg, in Geneva and in Dordrecht, in London 
and in Boston, and has mightily influenced the 
creeds and the prayers of many centuries. That 
the children's teeth are set on edge because the 
fathers have eaten sour grapes is a proverbial ex- 
pression of the doctrine that sin is hereditary ; that 
the guilt of ancestors is bequeathed to their de- 
scendants ; that one generation may be justly pun- 
ished for the misdeeds of former generations. This 
has been, since the days of Augustine, the ortho- 
dox doctrine, accepted by the great body of reli- 



WHAT DO WE INHERIT? 113 

gious teachers, Protestant and Catholic. It has 
been stated variously ; the manner in which this 
guilt is transmitted from generation to generation 
has been a subject of much controversy ; but the 
great majority of Christian teachers have main- 
tained that in some way the guilt of Adam's sin is 
transmitted to his descendants ; that they are justly 
punishable for what he did. The Roman Catholic 
Church clearly teaches that we are punished for 
Adam's sin, but the punishment consists in the loss 
of original holiness, rather than in the infliction of 
suffering. However, the case stands so that every 
infant comes into the world under the curse pro- 
nounced on Adam, and liable at its first breath to 
be consigned to everlasting separation from Ood. 
Baptism implants in the soul of this child the germ 
of grace, so that if it dies after baptism it is saved. 
If, however, an infant dies before baptism, the 
Catholic theology gives us no reason to hope for its 
future blessedness. It will not, indeed, suffer the 
torments of hell ; it is consigned to that limbus 
infantum, of which Dante tells us in the fourth 
canto of the Inferno. This is the abode of those 
of whom Virgil says : — 

*' That they sinned not ; and if they merit had, 
'T is not enough, because they had not baptism, 
Which is the portal o£ the Faith thou boldest : 
And if they were before Christianity, 
In the right manner they adored not God ; 
And among such as these am I myself. 
For such defects and not for other guilt, 
Lost are we, and are only so far punished 
That without hope, we live on in desire." 



114 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

Punishment enough, one would say, — through all 
eternity to cherish hopeless desires. This is the 
fate to which the orthodox Catholic theology still 
consigns unbaptized children. Much the same is 
true of High Anglicanism. So much emphasis is 
placed by that school upon the efficacy of sacra- 
ments, that the reception of baptism by the infant 
appears to be a clear condition of salvation. 
When the due performance of that rite has been 
omitted, the curse of the law appears to rest upon 
the little children. 

With all the churches of the Puritans, Congre- 
gationalists, and Presbyterians, there was no ques- 
tion about the inheritance of the curse pronounced 
on Adam. That was the foundation of orthodoxy. 
Our first parents " being the root of all mankind," 
says the Westminster Confession, " the guilt of 
their sin was imputed, and the same death in sin 
and corrupted nature conveyed to all their poster- 
ity, descending from them by ordinary generation. 
. . . Every sin both original and actual, being 
a transgression of the righteous law of God, and 
contrary thereunto, doth, in its own nature, bring 
guilt upon the sinner, whereby he is bound over 
to the wrath of God and curse of the law, and so 
made subject to death with all miseries, spiritual, 
temporal, and eternal." ^ 

No statement can be clearer than this, that every 
infant comes into the world under the curse of 
Adam's sin. Nor is there, by this creed, any such 

1 Westminster Confession^ chap. vL 



WHAT DO WE mHERIT? 115 

provision for canceling this curse by baptism, as 
the Roman Catholic doctrine affords. The doc- 
trine of election comes in here to assure us that 
elect infants will be saved, even if they are not 
baptized ; and that non-elect infants will be damned, 
no matter how promptly we may baptize them. 

This brief recital will indicate the extent to which 
this doctrine of the inheritance of sin has shaped 
theology. There have been, indeed, in all the ages 
those who protested against it ; since the sixteenth 
century the Arminians, among whom Wesleyans 
and Methodists of all names are to be reckoned, 
have stoutly denied it ; but it still remains true 
that up to this day the great majority of Chris- 
tians, Catholic and Protestant, retain in their 
creeds the idea that the guilt of Adam's sin is 
bequeathed to his descendants. 

That a great many of those who assent to these 
creeds have ceased to believe them, I have no 
doubt, but they still remain as the doctrinal sym- 
bols of the bodies holding them. 

That such a belief could have intrenched itself in 
our theology and held sway over the minds of men 
for so many centuries is evidence of the rudi- 
mentary and unclear ethical conceptions prevailing 
in men's minds. The moral sense must be imper- 
fectly developed which cannot see, on the least 
reflection, that guilt cannot be inherited. That I 
can be held responsible for the sins of my ances- 
tors, and be deserving of punishment for what they 
have done, is a proposition that conflicts with the 



116 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

foundations of morality. Guilt is absolutely per- 
sonal ; the word connotes moral responsibility for 
unlawful conduct ; and moral responsibility belongs 
to individuals, and can no more be transferred 
from one to another than the act of breathing can 
be performed by one person for another, or the 
sensation of cold be experienced by one person 
for another. My child can no more be guilty or 
deserving of punishment for my sin than he can 
see with my eyes or feel with my nerves. 

It is a little strange that the indignant protest 
of this old prophet was not oftener heard in the 
days when this doctrine of imputation and in- 
herited sin was taught and defended: "Yet say 
ye, Why ? doth not the son bear the iniquity of the 
father ? When the son hath done that which is 
lawful and right, and hath kept all my statutes and 
hath done them, he shall surely live. The soul 
that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear 
the iniquit}^ of the father, neither shall the father 
bear the iniquity of the son ; the righteousness of 
the righteous shall be upon him, and the wicked- 
ness of the wicked shall be upon him." 

This is the everlasting truth ; and any theologi- 
cal dogma which conflicts with it is false and mis- 
chievous. The doctrines that held us responsible 
for the sin of Adam, and deserving of punishment 
because of his offense, do not any longer command 
the credence of thoughtful men. If anybody pro- 
fesses to believe in inherited guilt, he at once 
makes it evident that he uses the word in a Pick- 



WHAT DO WE INHERIT? 117 

wickian sense ; he explains it all away so that it 
means something very different from what the term 
ordinarily conveys. Of the old doctrine of original 
sin, as taught and believed by our grandfathers, 
very little, thank God, is left. It was just what 
Ezekiel calls it, — a heathenish doctrine ; it imputed 
to God the most monstrous injustice ; to many in- 
genuous minds it was a grave impediment to faith. 

But how about heredity, you are asking? Is 
there no truth in heredity ? There is, I answer, a 
tremendous truth ; and it is this with which the 
theologians have been fumbling. They saw the 
facts of heredity ; they took the popular and poetic 
statements of the Scriptures concerning them, as 
scientific formulae, and out of these made up their 
dogmas. But they read neither the facts nor the 
Scriptures correctly, and therefore their dogma 
became a horrible accusation against the divine 
justice. 

What is heredity? "It is that biological law," 
answers Ribot, " by which all beings endowed with 
life tend to repeat themselves in their descendants ; 
it is for the species what personal identity is for 
the individual. By it a groundwork remains un- 
changed amid incessant variation ; by it Nature 
ever copies and imitates herself." ^ " It is that pro- 
perty of an organism," says Weissman, " by which 
its peculiar nature is transmitted to its descend- 
ants." 2 " Each child," says Dr. Bradford, " not 
only is related to the whole race as a species, but 

1 Heredity^ p. 1, ^ Essays on Heredity, p. 71. 



118 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

is in a peculiar sense the offspring of individuals, 
bearing within him signs of his parentage, not only 
in his bodily organism, but also, with equal clear- 
ness, in his mental and spiritual constitution." ^ 

.The first great outstanding fact of heredity is 
the fact of species. We will not dispute about the 
definition of species ; we all know that in all the 
world of living things " like produces like." Oaks 
grow from acorns and not from chestnuts ; lions 
are the offspring of lions, eagles of eagles, fish of 
fish, insects of insects, human beings of human be- 
ings. Even race peculiarities are inherited ; the 
child of pure Aryan parents never has the phy- 
sical or mental peculiarities of the African or the 
Mongolian ; the greyhound does not give birth to 
the mastiff, nor the short horn to the Jersey, nor 
the Percheron to the Hambletonian. 

More significant still is the transmission of per- 
sonal and family traits. The physical resemblance 
of children to their parents is the common fact ; 
often this resemblance is obvious to all observers ; 
sometimes it is extremely subtle, consisting less of 
featurely similitude than of evanescent shades o£ 
expression. In this case it is, however, mainly a 
matter of character. Family resemblances of this 
sort are often far more quickly observed by strangers 
than by kinsmen. Oftentimes a physical trait will be 
handed down for generations, like the aquiline nose 
of the Bourbons, or the " Batcheler eye " which 
Mr. Whittier inherited. 

1 Heredity and Christian Problems, p. 3. 



WHAT DO WE INHERIT? 119 

Special mental traits and aptitudes are also fre- 
quently transmitted. Galton's investigations im- 
pressively show us this fact. JEschylus had eight 
kinsmen who were poets. Coleridge was the first 
of a literary line. Thomas Arnold of Rugby was 
the father of Matthew Arnold and the grandfather 
of Mrs. Humphry Ward. In music the illustra- 
tions are many. Says Dr. Bradford : — 

" Andrea Amati was only the most illustrious 
member of a family of violinists at Cremona ; 
Mozart's father was a violinist ; Beethoven was the 
son of a tenor singer ; and Mendelssohn was of 
a musical family. The Bachs supply perhaps the 
most distinguished instance of mental heredity on 
record. The family began in 1550, and lasted 
through eight generations to the year 1800. Dur- 
ing a period of nearly two hundred years it pro- 
duced a number of artists of the first rank. Its 
head was Weit Bach, a baker of Presburg, who 
used to seek relaxation from labor in music and 
song. He had two sons who commenced the un- 
broken line of musicians of the same name that, 
for nearly two centuries, may be said to have over- 
run Thuringia, Saxony, and Franconia. They 
were all organists or church singers. When they 
had become too numerous to live near each other, 
and the members of the family were scattered 
abroad, they resolved to meet once a year, on a 
stated day, with a view to keeping up a sort of 
patriarchal bond of union. This custom was con- 
tinued until nearly the middle of the eighteenth 



120 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

century, and very often there gathered together 
more than one hundred persons bearing the name 
of Bach, men, women, and children. In this family 
are mentioned twenty-nine eminent musicians." ^ 

Doubtless in some of these cases the influence of 
environment as well as of heredity must be con- 
sidered ; a child who inherited no exceptional mu- 
sical talent, but who was born into such a musical 
atmosphere and surrounded with such associations 
as those of the Bach family, would be likely to be- 
come a good musician. Nevertheless the fact of 
inheritance, in all these cases, is established beyond 
cavil. Intellectual tendencies and aptitudes are 
handed down from generation to generation. 

There is a great dispute, just now, among the 
evolutionists, as to how much is transmitted. The 
new school of Darwinians, under the lead of Pro- 
fessor Weissmann, maintain that acquired charac- 
teristics are not transmitted ; that the parents may 
hand down to their children peculiarities which 
were theirs at birth, but do not bequeath any habits 
which they may have formed or any special quali- 
ties which they may have acquired. I cannot go 
into that discussion here ; the principal facts of 
heredity with which I have to deal are admitted by 
both parties. 

Are moral traits and qualities transmitted ? Do 
our children inherit our virtues and our vices? 
This is the question which most deeply concerns us 
now. 

1 Heredity and Christian Problems, p. 39. 



WHAT DO WE INHERIT? 121 

There seems to be plenty of evidence that tenden- 
cies to physical disease are transmitted. A child 
of consumptive parents is predisposed to consump- 
tion. Nervous disorders are still more likely to be 
inherited. One authority says that half the cases of 
insanity in France amongst the higher classes, and 
one third of those amongst the lower classes, have 
been inherited from parents or ancestors. The 
close connection between physical and moral disor- 
ders might indicate that if the former are inherited 
the latter also must be. But it is just here that we 
need to be very careful about our facts and our phi- 
losophy. Disease, disorder, infirmity, both of body 
and of mind, may be transmitted to offspring, and 
thus the children may be born with predispositions 
to vice and wrong-doing ; but this involves no guilt 
nor demerit ; the inheritors are in no wise respon- 
sible for what they have inherited ; neither good 
men nor a just God can blame them for their mis- 
fortune ; the vices of their parents or ancestors do 
not become theirs until by their own free consent 
and practice they make them theirs. 

The question whether intemperance is inherited 
is discussed by the doctors. Some of them say 
that there is no such thing as inheriting an appe- 
tite ; others, like one writer in the " Psychological 
Journal," tell us that "the most startling problem 
connected with intemperance is that not only does 
it affect the health, morals, and intelligence of the 
offspring of its votaries, but that they also inherit 
the fatal tendency and/ee^ a craving for the very 



122 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

heverages which have acted as poisons on their sys- 
tem from the commencement of their heingT ^ This 
inheritance of a specific appetite may or may not 
be common ; but there is no doubt that the chil- 
dren of drunkards do inherit from their parents a 
neurotic diathesis which predisposes them to intem- 
perance. The nerves and the stomach are in a con- 
dition which calls for some artificial stimulant, and 
thus the children are easily led into the slippery 
path by which their parents went down to doom. In 
the words of Ribot : " The passion known as dip- 
somania or alcoholism is so frequently transmitted 
that all are agreed in considering its heredity as 
the rule. Not, however, that the passion for drink 
is always transmitted in that identical form, for it 
often degenerates into mania, idiocy, and hallucina- 
tion. Conversely, insanity in the parents may be- 
come alcoholism in the descendants." ^ Some such 
dreadful entail of morbid tendencies is almost sure 
to pass to the drunkard's children. Yet here is a 
fact which I have observed : the drunkard's chil- 
dren often live sober lives, while his children's 
children follow in his footsteps. This may be due 
to the fact that heredity sometimes skips a genera- 
tion, but it is more probably the result of purely 
moral causes. The children of the drunkard suf- 
fer so bitterly from their father's fault that their 
grief and shame counteract the hereditary tendenc}^, 
and make them shun the fatal indulgence. Their 

1 Quoted by Elam, A Physician's Problems, p. 40. 

2 Heredity, p. 85. 



WHAT DO WE INHERIT? 123 

children, inheriting the same tendency and having 
no such object lesson before their eyes, and no such 
moral influence deterring them, are drawn unawares 
into the ways of death. 

Precisely as intemperance is transmitted, so also 
is pauperism and crime. The infirmities and ten- 
dencies out of which pauperism and crime naturally 
spring are transmitted by criminals and paupers to 
their offspring. That terrible little book of Dr. 
Dugdale's entitled " The Jukes," traces the pro- 
geny of one unhappy girl through several genera- 
tions. It shows that of the 700 descendants of this 
woman whose cases were examined, 280 became 
paupers after reaching maturity. Only 22 of the 
700 had acquired any property, and eight of these 
lost it all ; 76 were known to have been convicted of 
crimes and punished, while as many more were un- 
doubtedly following criminal courses. More than 
52 per cent of the females of this line followed lives 
of shame, and twenty-three and a half per cent 
of the children were illegitimate. Blood tells ; and 
no kind of blood has, a more impressive story to 
tell than this kind. 

The vices and -excesses of people of this class, 
their irregular habits, and their imperfect alimen- 
tation result in transmitting to their progeny con- 
stitutions undervitalized and tending to still further 
degeneration. Children of such parentage easily 
become paupers. Indolence is constitutional with 
them. We hear of persons who were born tired ; it 
is something more than a pleasantry. " If any law," 



124 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

says Dr. Bradford, " is well established, it is the law 
of heredity as manifested in the transmission of 
qualities and tendencies that lead to vice, pauper- 
ism, and crime. Indeed, much of pauperism is only 
one manifestation, and much of vice is largely the 
outcome of physical disease, the hereditary nature 
of which we have already discovered. A large 
proportion of the dangerous classes have received 
from a vicious ancestry qualities and tendencies 
which with their environment they are almost pow- 
erless to resist. That which is the heritage of in- 
temperate and licentious parents, a weakened vital 
state which almost destroys ambition and makes 
labor seem impossible, society denounces as laziness 
But we are always at first what others make us." 

Such is a brief exhibit of some of the salient 
facts of heredity, facts that most deeply concern 
every one of us. For there is not one of us here who 
has not inherited some infirmities and tendencies to 
evil, who does not find in his nature some weakness 
or bias, for which he is indebted to those whose life is 
in his veins. And there are many among us who 
have thus come into the possession of a vast estate 
of evil tendency, whose disabilities and predispo- 
sitions to vice and crime are a fearful load. 

To say that they are to blame for this — that 
they are under the wrath and curse of God, on 
account of the misdoing of their parents or of any 
of their ancestors, from Adam down — is to say 
a horrible thing ; it comes perilously near to blas- 
phemy. They deserve, instead of wrath, the ten- 



WHAT DO WE INHERIT? 125 

derest pity of God and of all good men ; and they 
do not fail to receive it. The Psalmist says that 
like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord 
pitieth them that fear him. Not only them that 
fear Him, but them that are farthest from Him ; 
that are weakest and most depraved in nature ; 
that come into life with the heaviest encumbrance 
of frailty and evil tendency. If there are any of 
his children whom the Heavenly Father loves bet- 
ter than the rest or more tenderly longs to help, 
they are these. Unless all that Jesus Christ has 
told us about the Heavenly Father is untrue, this 
is in his heart. 

What shall we say, then, about this power of 
hereditary evil over the lives of men ? Is it irre- 
sistible ? That is a question in which some of us 
have a deep interest. Some of us are conscious 
that we are bearing about in our lives a bad 
legacy ; its evil impulsions and its crippling re- 
straints trouble us continually. That we are not 
to blame for what we have inherited, we know ; 
we are only to blame for the added strength that 
we have given to these bad elements by yielding 
to them and cherishing them. But are we help- 
less under their impulse ? Is it impossible for us 
to resist and overcome them ? 

Candidly, let me say, I do not think that we are 
helpless ; I believe that it is possible for us to 
resist and overcome. And this faith of mine rests, 
first and last, on the one great fact which is funda- 
mental in ail my thinking, that there is a God, and 



126 AVHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

that his name is Love. If reason and goodness are 
the heart of the universe, then God has not per- 
mitted any evil force which we cannot overcome to 
get possession of your life or mine. It may take 
a hard battle, but there is nothing better for any 
man than a good fight. And if God is good He 
has not sent a foe against us that by his grace 
we may not conquer. 

And this faith of mine is supported, too, by 
facts innumerable. I believe that men can resist 
and overcome the strongest influences of heredity 
because I have seen them do it, over and over 
again. I have seen scores and hundreds of men 
and women, with all sorts of bad blood in their 
veins, stand up against the inbred sin and fight it 
and conquer it, and win glorious manhood and 
w^omanhood in the struggle. That very fact of 
which we spoke a few moments since, that the chil- 
dren of drunken parents often resist hereditary 
tendencies while their children to whom the same 
influences are transmitted, in weaker form, suc- 
cumb to them, shows what can be done when the 
moral nature is roused to resist the evil. 

Two or three things any man can do, when he 
finds himself under such a burden. 

First, he can wish and determine to get free from 
it. He can highly resolve that nothing that he can 
do to cast it off shall be left undone. 

Second, he can put himself into associations and 
under influences which will help him in this fight. 
He can choose for himself a better environment. 



WHAT DO WE INHERIT? 127 

And this brings in a fact of mighty import to 
which I can hardly do more than allude. Envi- 
ronment is certainly no less important a fact than 
heredity. The inherited tendencies within us are 
no more powerful in shaping our ends than are the 
circumstances and influences round about us. The 
best-born child, if brought up in the slums, is 
likely to be contaminated and ruined ; the child 
that is born in the slums and is adopted in infancy 
into a perfect Christian home is likely to grow up 
into virtue. This is not always so ; for we have 
seen fair flowers blossoming in the gutter, and 
have found, to our sorrow, that the most salutary 
education sometimes fails to eliminate an ancestral 
taint. And yet, the main fact is that a good envi- 
ronment will prevail over a bad heredity. Dr. 
Bradford's well-weighed words probably express 
the truth : " Where there is no organic defect, as 
in insanity or idiocy, environment is the stronger 
force." "The experience," he says, "of such or- 
ganizations as the Children's Aid Society, which 
seeks to save children by placing them in new and 
better conditions, points to the same conclusion ; it 
is all favorable to the theory that environment will 
modify heredity, and when given a fair chance has 
power to redeem it." 

Here, then, is a force of which any victim of a 
bad heredity may avail himself ; he may take him- 
self out of vile associations ; he may surround 
himself with influences that will stimulate and 
strengthen his better purposes, his nobler powers. 



128 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

And this brings us to the one thing which he 
must not fail to do. He must recognize the fact 
that the greatest of all the forces that are working 
for his salvation is this very force of heredity. 
Heredity ! We have been talking of it as a tre- 
mendous fact, and it is ; we have been thinking 
of it, perhaps, as if it were a fact of significance 
purely malign, and it is not. There are two sides 
to heredity. Is the tendency to sin the only thing 
that we inherit ? Not unless God is a fiend. No, 
no ; goodness, purity, truth, honor, fidelity, — or 
the natural qualities from which these spring, — are 
also handed down from father to son ; the pure 
stream of benign influence flows on from genera- 
tion to generation ; and while the evil tendency is 
apt to be noisiest and most obtrusive, the good is 
there, far more vital, far more persistent, than the 
evil. The worst man you know, in whose veins is 
flowing blood that a bad heredity and a bad envi- 
ronment have been conspiring to taint, has still in 
him many germs of good influence, — sentiments, 
impulses, wishes, that will spring to life if he will 
give them a chance to live. To discern these ele- 
ments of good in his own nature, to rejoice in 
them, to believe that in them his real self is mani- 
fested, to cherish them as his dearest possessions — 
this is what every man must learn to do. These are 
the signs that God is working in him to will and 
to work of his good pleasure. 

For what, after all, my brother, is the deepest 
fact about this heredity which has so sorely trou- 



WHAT DO WE INHERIT?? 129 

bled you ? What is your parentage ? Whose 
child are you ? Is not God your Father ? Are 
you not made in his image ? Is it not his nature 
that you have inherited ? And in spite of all that 
you have done, and of all that has been done by 
your progenitors to mar and defile the divinity 
within you, it is there still, the deepest, the most 
central fact, connected with your history. Doubt- 
less your life may have been such as utterly to belie 
that glorious truth, even to hide it from your own 
eyes ; but it is the truth nevertheless, and there is 
no other truth that means so much to you. 

This, I say, is the fundamental truth about he- 
redity. Instead of being a millstone about your 
neck it ought to be the anchor of your soul, sure 
and steadfast. No matter how low you may have 
fallen, no matter what the disabilities and evil ten- 
dencies of your life may be, God is your Father, 
his life is in you, his power is working to save you. 
Sin may abound in you, but unto you, yea in you, 
his grace, if you will only receive it, shall much 
more abound. 

This is the gospel, the glorious gospel of the 
blessed God, the good news that Jesus came to 
bring. Let every struggling soul, weighed down 
by inherited tendencies to sin, crying, with Paul, 
" O wretched man that I am ! Who shall deliver 
me from the body of this death ? " lay hold on this 
hope set before him in the gospel ! 

Let us rise, for one moment, before we separate, 
to a point of view at which we can comprehend the 



130 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

action of these forces whicli we are considering in 
the education of tlie race. 

The central fact of heredity is God. No one 
can believe anything else who believes in God at 
all. It is a mighty power working out his designs. 
Evil as well as good is transmitted, because of the 
organic unity of humanity ; because the genera- 
tions must be sharers of one another's woes and 
weaknesses, if they are also to be sharers in one 
another's joys and triumphs. The discipline by 
which alone character is perfected must involve 
partnership in suffering as well as in blessedness. 
But God is in his world, always working along 
these lines of inheritance. Can any sane man be- 
lieve that he is on the side of evil tendency ? No ; 
the evil is in its very nature temporary ; it cancels 
itself ; the good has in it the life of eternity. The 
old promise of the decalogue shows us a glimpse 
of the truth. " I the Lord thy God am a jealous 
God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon 
their children unto the third and fourth generations 
of them that hate me, and showing mercy 2into 
thousands of generations [this is the right ti-ans- 
lation] of them that love me and keep my com- 
mandments." The evil entail dies out after a few 
generations, the grace of God lives and grows for 
a thousand generations. And thus in this very 
law of heredity is lodged the power that is yet to 
redeem the race. 

" But there is that other fact of environment," 
you are saying. Yes, thank God. For what, in 



WHAT DO WE INHERIT? 131 

the largest sense, is the environment? It is God's 
universe ; it is God. It is the world whose very 
foundations were laid in a grand redemptive pur- 
pose. It is the world whose elemental energies, in 
the morning of the creation, were baptized in the 
name of the Christ whose love, before all worlds, 
was the very heart of God. For he is " the first- 
born of all creation ; for in him were all things 
created in the heavens and upon the earth. . . . 
All things have been created through him, and 
unto him ; and he is before all things, and in him 
all things consist." This is the environment of 
humanity upon the earth. This is the mighty, all- 
enfolding power which, with its slow and silent 
pressure, through the unhasting centuries, is work- 
ing out the great designs of sovereign love. 

Heredity and environment are the master words 
of our new science of life. I thank thee, evolu- 
tionist, for teaching me these words ! For what is 
heredity? It is God, working in us. And what 
is environment ? It is God, working round about 
us. 

These are the larger truths which the unfolding 
thought of these latter days is bringing into clearer 
light. What a new gospel it is, and what a mighty 
hope it holds, for all who work for the triumph of 
truth and purity and peace upon the earth ! How 
sure it makes us feel that 

" life shall on and upward go : 
The eternal step of progress beats 

To that great anthem, calm and slow, 
Which God repeats." 



132 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

How evident it is that the dreaded eTolution, which 
was to undermine our faith, has. in the words of 
Drummond, '* ushered a new hope into the world." 
For just as soon as we are able to understand her 
Toiees we shall know that ** the supreme message 
of Science to this age is that all nature is on the 
side of the man who tries to rise." And all natore 
is but the rcTelation of God. 

And this, O church of God, fumbling so long 
with your metaphysical refinements and your scho- 
lastic dogmas, is the real gospel of the Son of God, 
which, if you will only receive it, will give yon 
strength to vnn the world. For the heavens above 
you, breaking forth into song, and the earth round 
about you. growing conscious of the presence of its 
Maker, are crying unto you, and saying, "Arise 
and shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of 
the Lord is risen upon thee ! '' 



Til 

THE DOCTEDv'E OF THE TEESTTY 

The doctrine of the Trinity is not explicitly 
taiiglit in any single passage ui Holy Scripture : it 
is inferred from these .^-:rip:ares rather than for- 
mulated by them. This is not. however, any con- 
clusive disproof of the doctrine, for the doctrinal 
formularies of the Scriptures are few or none. 
Most theological propositions are gathered by 
induction from the biblical teachiuas. The last 
commission of the Master to his disciples is as 
strong an intimation of the truth which this doc- 
trine involves as can be ly-inl in r^.:e Xew Testa- 
ment. Disciples are to be buL'tiz^d "into the 
name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy 
Ghost.'' This implies a threefoldness in the divin- 
ity to whom this consecrating' oath oi bav'tism is 
spoken. The threefoldness is n^:'i dc-nncd : per- 
haps the abstinence from definition is here a mark 
of superhuman vr^nora. But those who heard 
these words sp^k^n. airer the confession of their 
faith at the font or by the riverside, must have 
gained some ncttion of a certain threeness in the 
Being to vrhom they had confessed their allegiance. 
From these and many other words of Scripture the 



IM WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

thouglit of the church in the first three centuries 
very easily and naturally drew the theological 
statements of the doctrine of the Trinity. 

In the form in which these statements have come 
down to us they are encumbered with insoluble 
difficulties. The doctrine of the Trinity, in the 
terms in which I was first taught to express it, 
is a barrier to reason and a stumbling-block to 
faith. It is only by shutting the eye of the under- 
standing that one can accept it. The old state- 
ment was that there are three Persons in the God- 
head, and the word Person was supposed to be the 
essential word ; one must speak that word out 
clearly or one was a heretic. The emphasis put 
upon this word had the effect to make the three- 
ness very distinct and the unity very indistinct. 
" I went one day," says one of the characters in a 
most helpful little book, " to our old minister, Dr. 
Sandy, who used to preach on it now and then. 
' How,' said I, ' can three persons be one God ? ' 
He replied that the three are indeed persons, as 
distinct from each other as Peter, James, and John, 
but that they were, notwithstanding, one in the 
unity of a common divine nature, as Peter, James, 
and John are one in the unity of a common human 
nature." ^ This is the popular conception, and it is 
purely tritheistic. It is no slander to say that a 
great many Christians in America have believed 
in three gods. Thus Jonathan Edwards, in his 
famous " Observations upon the Trinity," con- 

1 Gloria Patri, by J. M. Whiton, p. 15. 



THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 135 

stantly applies the pronouns of the third person 
plural to the persons of the Trinity ; he speaks 
always of " them ; " he tells with a great deal of 
minuteness what " they " have covenanted and 
agreed with one another that " they " will do in 
the work of redemption. There is a subordination 
among them, he says, which " must be conceived 
of as in some respect established by mutual free 
agreement whereby the Persons of the Trinity, of 
their own will, have as it were formed themselves 
into a society for carrying on the great design of 
glorifying the Deity and communicating its full- 
ness." And again : " Nothing is more plain from 
Scripture than that the Father chooses the Person 
that shall be the Redeemer, and appoints him ; 
and that the Son has his authority in his office 
wholly from Him ; which makes it evident that 
the economy by which the Father is Head of the 
Trinity is prior to the covenant of redemption. 
For He acts as such in the very making of that 
covenant, in choosing the Person of the Redeemer 
to be covenanted with about that work. The Fa- 
ther is the Head of the Trinity, and is invested 
with a right to act as such, before the Son is in- 
vested with the office of a mediator. Because the 
Father, in the exercise of his Headship, invests 
the Son with that office. By which it is evident, 
that that establishment by which the Father is in- 
vested with his character as the Head of the Trin- 
ity, precedes that which invests the Son with his 
character of mediator ; and therefore precedes the 



136 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

covenant of redemption ; which is the establishment 
that invests the Son with that character. If the 
Son were invested with the office of a mediator by 
the same establishment and agreement of the Per- 
sons of the Trinity by which the Father is invested 
with power to act as Head of the Trinity, then 
the Father could not be said to elect and appoint 
the Son to his office of mediator, and invest Him 
with authority for it, any more than the Son elects 
and invests the Father with his character of Head 
of the Trinity ; or any more than the Holy Ghost 
elects both the Son and the Father to their several 
ceconomical offices ; and the Son would receive his 
powers to be a mediator no more from the Father 
than from the Holy Ghost. Because in this scheme 
it is supposed that prior to the covenant of Re- 
demption, all the Persons act as upon a level, and 
each Person, by one common agreement in that 
covenant of redemption, is invested with his proper 
office ; the Father with that of Head, the Son with 
that of Mediator, the Spirit with that of common 
emissary and consummatour of the designs of the 
other two." ^ 

I have made a liberal extract, because it is well 
for us to get the full flavor of that old Trinitarian- 
ism which was nothing more or less than tritheism. 
The conception of the Trinity which Jonathan 
Edwards held, and which has been held by hun- 
dreds of thousands of devout men, is that of a 

1 Observations concerning the Scripture (Economy of the Trinity, 
pp. 30-32. 



THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 137 

triumvirate of independent deities who enter into 
covenants and contracts with one another, who es- 
tablish among themselves an order of precedence, 
and parcel out the work of redemption according 
to an economy of their own with which this theolo- 
gian appears to be strangely familiar. Of course 
the unity of the Godhead was always asserted by 
theologians of this class ; they kept saying that 
there was but one God ; but the unity was little 
more than a barren phrase, in their conception of 
it ; the over-mastering and all inclusive idea was 
the threeness. So in all their doctrinal exposi- 
tions, in their theories of the Atonement, in their 
explanation of the mediatorial work of Christ, this 
tritheistic conception dominated everything. This 
was not true of the first three or four centuries ; 
the Greek theologians who first wrought out this 
doctrine of the Trinity were great thinkers, and 
they carefully kept themselves out of these verbal 
snares ; but it is true of the legal and mechanical 
theology which has prevailed in the Reformed 
churches for the last three centuries. It is not 
the doctrine of the great church creeds; neither 
the Apostles' Creed nor the Nicene Creed gives 
any footing to these tritheistic conceptions ; they 
were developed in the attempts of the later Re- 
formers to work out, under forensic analogies, a 
logical " plan of salvation." 

This tritheism results, as I have said, from the 
emphasis placed on the word Person in the defini- 
tion of Trinity. For although there have always 



138 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

been various definitions by which the word was 
partially explained away, it has never been possible 
to vacate the word of its natural signification, and 
its implications have constantly vitiated not only 
the conceptions of the common people, but also the 
speculations of the theologians. For this word 
person cannot be used, in familiar speech, without 
conveying the two ideas of consciousness and will. 
You cannot think of a person without ascribing to 
him in your thought both self-consciousness and 
will. Now to say that there are in the Godhead 
three consciousnesses and three wills is to say that 
there are three gods. I hope that it is not hereti- 
cal to deny that there are three gods — to insist, 
with old Israel, that the Lord our God is one Lord. 
Therefore the revolt of the older Unitarianism 
against a doctrine of the Trinity which practically 
denied the unity of God was justifi^ed ; the protest 
was in the interest of sound thinking and sound 
morality. Let me give you authority on this sub- 
ject which will hardly be questioned — the word 
of Mr. Joseph Cook. 

" Have there not been teachers who have held 
that there are three wills in God ? Yes. Have 
there not been in New England intelligent Chris- 
tians who have worshiped three beings in their 
imagination, although in their thoughts they have 
asserted that God is one ? I fear that there have 
been, and that there are yet. . . . Are we to regard 
those as well-educated Christians who in thoughts 
of God are constantly thinking of our Lord as if 



THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 139 

he were at this hour in Gethsemane, or on the 
Mount of Olives, or walking on the shore of Gali- 
lee ; and of the Father as among the constellations ; 
and of the Spirit as shed down on us from the in- 
finite spaces : three wills, three intellects, three sets 
of affections ? You may regard such Christians 
tenderly ; but for one, I regard them tenderly 
enough to wish that they might be both more bibli- 
cal and more scientific." " I had rather, my 
friends, go back to the Bosphorus, where I stood a 
few months ago, and worship with that emperor 
who lately slit his veins and went hence by suicide, 
than to be in name only an orthodox believer, or 
in theory to hold that there is but one God, but in 
imagination to worship three gods. . . . T affirm 
that I had rather go back to that shore of the azure 
water which connects the Black Sea with the Med- 
iterranean, and omitting the leprosy of Moham- 
medanism, take for my religion pure Theism, than 
to hold that there are three gods with three wills, 
three sets of affections, three intellects, three con- 
sciences, and thus to deny the assurances of both 
scriptural and scientific truth, and make of myself 
the beginning of a polytheist, though calling my- 
self orthodox." ^ 

I think that Mr. Cook bears needlessly hard on 
Jonathan Edwards and all the rest of the good 
people who have been entangled in these tritheis- 
tic mazes ; their hearts were right though their 
heads were puzzled, and I, for my part, would take 

1 Transcendentalism, chap, xi. 



140 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

my chances with them a great deal sooner than 
with the worshipers on the banks of the Bosphorus. 
Nevertheless, Mr. Cook is quite right in contend- 
ing that any doctrine which loosens the hold of 
men on the great central truth of the divine unity 
is misleading and dangerous. I am sure that .the 
reverence which is due to God has been weakened, 
sadly weakened, by these tritheistic confusions. 

Still, here are the words, the great commission of 
our Lord and Master : " Go ye therefore and make 
disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the 
name of the Father and of the Son and of the 
Holy Ghost.''"' .Are these words meaningless ? I 
believe that they are full of divine significance. I 
believe that they convey to us a truth which no 
man can afford to neglect, a truth which lies at 
the basis of all sound thinking in philosophy and 
religion. It seems to me incredible that a belief 
which has been held by the vast majority of Chris- 
tians for eighteen centuries should not rest on a 
solid substratum of truth. The forms in which 
this truth has found expression may have been gro- 
tesque and inadequate, but the truth is there ; men 
have been feeling after it, though they could not 
find words to define it. We shall not be able to 
define it. These themes that touch the infinite do 
not lend themselves to the phrases of our formal 
logic. Far less is said than is left unsaid when our 
weightiest word has been spoken ; but if we look 
steadfastly away for a little while toward the 
depths of infinite Being, it ma}^ be possible to find 



4 

THE DOCTKINE OF THE TRINITY 141 

a point or two of light. Of course I am not speak- 
ing at this time to those who have no faith, but to 
those who believe in God, and who seek to know 
and obey Him. 

To all those who believe in, God and worship 
Him, the primary truth about Him is that his name 
is Love. That his crowning attribute is goodness, 
not power, is the foundation of faith. Science we 
know, and law we know ; but the deepest thing in 
the universe is love. Of all forms of Christian 
faith this is the postulate. What God is now He 
has been from all eternity. From everlasting to 
everlasting, his essential nature is the same. If 
love is the central element in his being to-day, it 
must always have been so. But there must have 
been a time when the created universe was not. 
In that dateless eternity God was love. But whom 
was there to love ? Was it self-love that consumed 
his infinite energies ? The thought is horrible, 
almost blasphemous. No ; if from the beginning 
God was love, from the beginning there must have 
been in his very nature some kind of manifoldness 
or otherness, which could give scope to his affec- 
tions. This gives us no hint of threeness in the 
divine nature ; it only shows us that we must make 
room in our conceptions for something other than 
a solitary inhabitant of eternity. 

To all Christian worshipers God is the " Father 
in heaven." Nor can we imagine that this name 
expresses any recent addition to his attributes. 
Fatherhood belongs to the essence of his being. 



142 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

It is not a function that He has taken on for tem- 
porary purposes. Not only is He the Eternal Ruler, 
He is also the Eternal Father. But as there can be 
no son without a father, so there can be no father 
without a son. 'X^Q Eternal Father implies the 
Eternal Son. What all this signifies, I do not try 
to tell ; I shall not imitate Jonathan Edwards in 
his dissertation upon the " CEconomy of the Trin- 
ity ; " but it is certain that the word which sums 
up all our highest thoughts of God implies the dis- 
tinction which underlies the doctrine of the Trin- 
ity. Of course these words are used symbolically ; 
but what is it that they symbolize ? If man is 
made in the image of God there must be something 
in the nature of God to which these terms corre- 
spond. The terms " Fatherhood " and " Sonship,'* 
says Dr. Fairbairn, " represent love as native to 
God and as eternal as God. For Him it never 
began to be, for this is the meaning of the Eternal 
Sonship. The love of man has a potential before 
it has an actual being . . . but the love of God 
had always an actual^ never a potential being, for 
only so could it be perfect love. . . . Man can 
never know a father's affection unless he be a 
father, or woman a mother's love unless she be a 
mother. The capacity may be there, but only the 
capacity, the aptitude to be, not the actual being. 
But the Godhead means that as Fatherhood and 
Sonship have been eternal, so also has the love. 
. . . Hence creation did not mean for God the 
beginning of love, or even any exercise of it." ^ 
1 The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, p. 410. 



THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 143 

We are beginning, in these days, to understand 
that no man can be a man alone. It is only in the 
right relations with others that he realizes himself. 
And if man is made in the image of God, there 
must be some such ethical relation as this in God 
himself. He cannot be a solitary monad, an infi- 
nite Ego, sitting apart and speechless through all 
eternity. " The Creator," says Fairbairn, " is the 
archetype even more than the architect of the cre- 
ation ; the Godhead is, as it were, the idea and 
model after which it is built. He who is according 
to his essence a society makes a social universe." 

Going a little deeper than this into the mysteries 
of being, we find a foundation in necessary thought 
for that threefoldness which is involved in the doc- 
trine of the Trinity. 

What are the elements of Knowledge? How 
much do I surely know ? In the first place I know 
myself. I know the operations of my own mind, 
the facts of self-consciousness. I know that I am 
I ; that I have certain thoughts, certain feelings, 
certain purposes ; that certain pleasures and pains 
are part of my experience ; that these successions 
of thought and feeling and will are bound together 
in the unity of a conscious personality. 

In the second place I know that there is a world 
outside of myself. Forms and colors and sounds 
and pressures and flavors of all kinds report them- 
selves in my experience, and signify to me the pre- 
sence of existences all about me with which I am 
strangely related. The business of life is learning 



144 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

to distlnguisli and classify and reason about these 
experiences, and to comprehend the objects and 
the forces which they bring before my thought. 
Between myself and the world outside of myself 
the distinction is clear and sharp ; the " me " and 
the "not me" are the opposite poles of thought. 
But the more I know about this world outside of 
myself, the clearer it becomes that it is one world, 
that a principle of unity binds all its phenomena 
together, that all these marvelous varieties of being 
" are but parts of one stupendous whole." One 
law of gravitation controls every particle of mat- 
ter in all these worlds ; one law of the conservation 
of energy explains all these permutations and trans- 
formations of force. It is a Universe — that is the 
fundamental fact. 

And now, when I begin to study a little more 
carefully the relations between the " me " and the 
" not me," — between myself and the universe out- 
side of myself, — some very curious facts at once 
come to light. The sharp distinction, the contra- 
riety, between the world of thought within and the 
world of being without is all the while asserting 
itself ; but, on the other hand, the harmony be- 
tween the thinking mind and the objects of thought 
is marvelous. For the awakening of the powers 
of the mind itself is due, no doubt, to the action 
of stimuli from the outside world upon the senses. 
We come to ourselves, to the knowledge of our 
own powers, only through the mediumship of things 
outside of ourselves. The light which the baby 



THE DOCTEINE OF THE TRINITY 145 

sees, the surfaces which he touches, the flavors 
which he tastes arouse his perceptive faculties, and 
set his mind at work. From the child's first con- 
scious moment, the things that are round about 
him constantly appeal to him through every ave- 
nue of sense ; all manner of sights and sounds and 
odors are striking upon his senses and stirring up 
his intellect. This is by no means saying that all 
knowledge comes through the senses ; it is only 
saying that through the senses come the stimuli by 
which the mind is awakened. 

" The baby, new to eartb and sky 

What time his tender palm is pressed 
Against the arches of the breast 
Has never thought that ' this is I ; ' 

" But as he grows he gathers much, 
And learns the use of ' I ' and ' me ' 
And finds ' I am not what I see 
And other than the things I touch ; * 

" So rounds he to a separate mind 

From whence clear memory may begin, 
As through the frame that binds him in 
His isolation grows defined." 

But not only do we find ourselves through our 
contact with the world outside of ourselves, it is 
also true that we find in ourselves the interpreta- 
tion of that outside world. The laws of space and 
time, of cause and effect, of identity and resem- 
blance, of number and quantity, are purely ideal ; 
they belong to the furniture of our own minds ; and 
yet that world outside of us is utterly meaningless 



146 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

and unintelligible until we have brought it under 
the light of these ideas. We talk about the laws 
of nature, but these laws only express the corre- 
spondence of the facts of nature to the regulative 
ideas of our own reason. It is this correspondence 
which is the marvelous fact. The categories of 
reason supply the principles by which all this out- 
side world can be perfectly explained. We take 
this lamp of reason and walk with it firmly and 
fearlessly through every part of the universe ; the 
world within is a perfect mirror of the world with- 
out. 

" All our life, then," says Dr. Edward Caird, 
" moves between these two terms which are essen- 
tially distinct from and even opposed to each other. 
Yet, though thus set in an antagonism which can 
never cease, because with its ceasing the whole 
nature of both would be subverted, they are also 
essentially related, nor could either of them be 
conceived to exist without the other ; the conscious- 
ness of the one, we might even say, is inseparably 
the consciousness of its relation to the other. We 
know the object only as we bring it back to the 
unity of the self ; we know the subject only as we 
realize it in the object." ^ 

And now comes an inference of mighty signifi- 
cance, which I shall let Dr. Caird draw for you at 
length because no words of my own could express 
it so clearly : " These two ideas, between which 
our whole life of thought and action is contained, 
^ The Evolution of Eeligion, p. 65. 



THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 147 

and from one to the other of which it is continually 
moving, point back to a third idea which embraces 
them both, and which in turn constitutes their limit 
and ultimate condition. For when we have two 
terms, which are thus essentially distinguished and 
essentially related, which we are obliged to con- 
trast and oppose to each other, seeing that they 
have neither of them any meaning except as oppo- 
site counterparts of each other, and which we are 
equally obliged to U7iite, seeing that the whole con- 
tent of each is just its movement toward the other, 
we are necessarily driven to think of these two 
terms as the manifestation or realization of a third 
term, which is higher than either. . . . Each of 
them presupposes the other, and therefore neither 
of them can be regarded as producing the other. 
Hence, we are compelled to think of them both as 
rooted in a still higher principle, which is at once 
the source of their relatively independent existence 
and the all-embracing unity that limits their inde- 
pendence. This principle, therefore, may be im- 
aged as a crystal sphere that holds them together, 
and which, through its very transparency, is apt to 
escape our notice, yet which must always be there 
as the condition and limit of their operation. To 
put it more directly, the idea of an absolute unity 
— which transcends all the oppositions of finitude, 
and especially the last opposition which includes 
all others, the opposition of subject and object — is 
the ultimate presupposition of our consciousness, 
. . . The idea of God, therefore, — meaning by 



148 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

that, in the first instance, only the idea of an abso- 
lute principle of unity which binds in one ' all think- 
ing things, all objects of all thought,' which is at 
once the source of being to all things that are, and 
of knowing to all beings that know, — is an essen- 
tial principle, or rather the ultimate essential prin- 
ciple of our intelligence, a principle which must 
manifest itself in the life of every rational creature. 
Every creature who is capable of the consciousness 
of an objective world and of the consciousness of 
a self is capable also of the consciousness of God. 
Or, to sum up the whole matter in one word, every 
rational being as such is a religious being." ^ 

Here is a truth from which you can no more 
escape than you can escape from your shadow. 
By this I do not mean that all human beings 
have come to a realization of this truth ; there are 
some human beings who cannot count twenty ; 
multitudes to whom the simplest of mathematical 
laws are utterly unknown ; but if you should take 
these people from the wilds of Patagx)nia, and put 
them into a primary school, and explain to them 
the words in which these laws are conveyed, and 
show them these relations of numbers and quantity, 
they could no more deny or doubt them than they 
could deny or doubt their own existence. A man 
can escape from his shadow by going into the dark ; 
if he comes under the light of the sun the shadow 
is there. A man may be so mentally undisci- 
plined that he does not recognize the ideas of which 
^ The Evolution of Beligion, pp. 66-68. 



THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 149 

we have been speaking, but let him learn the use 
of his reason, let him reflect upon his own mental 
processes, and he will know that they are necessary 
ideas. When he knows himself, when he knows 
the world of phenomena outside of himself, when 
he becomes conscious of the fact that the world 
within and the world without are set over against 
each other in the sharpest discrimination, and yet 
that they are so essentially related to each other 
that neither has any life or order or significance 
without the other, then he must, if he is a rational 
being, be forced to the conclusion that above these 
correlated existences there must be a Power by 
whom their correlation is ordained, a Being from 
whom they both proceed, a Unity in which they 
cohere. There is nothing in mathematics more 
certain than this. 

Have we not here, in these fundamental laws of 
the mind itself, a suggestion of that threefoldness 
which men are trying to comprehend when they 
attempt to state the doctrine of the Trinity ? 

There is a Spirit that witnesseth to our spirits 
that we are the children of God. 

There is a Universe without, a marvelous Crea- 
tion, from which the everlasting power and divinity 
shine forth. Of this Creation, man, who is made 
in the image of God, is the crown ; of this humanity, 
Jesus, the Christ of Nazareth, is the consummation, 
the completion, — Son of man and Son of God. 
In him, Paul says, all things come to a Head ; he 



150 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

is the explanation of the Creation ; in him all 
things consist. 

There is a Living God, above all this Universe, 
the Infinite and Eternal Power, from whom all 
things proceed ; whose thought gives it unity, 
v^^hose love is the soul of its order and the spring 
of its beneficence ; a Being whom no man hath 
seen nor can see, but whose existence is the pre- 
supposition of all coherent thought. 

The Absolute and Eternal God, Source of all 
being, dwelling in light unapproachable ; 

The Manifested God, revealed to us in Nature 
and in History — especially and most perfectly in 
the Incarnation, which is the consummation of Na- 
ture and the goal of History ; 

The Indwelling God, who reveals himself in our 
thought, who speaks in our consciences, whose in- 
spiration is the motive power of all our best en- 
deavors. 

Are not these three ideas necessarily implied in 
all our thought upon these highest themes ? 

"The Trinity of the Living God," says Dr. 
Whiton, " must be a Trinity in His life. And this, 
according to the scriptural idea of God . . . must 
include these three terms: the Transcendent Di- 
vine Life that is above the world, the Immanent 
Divine Life that is universal through the world 
and perfected in the Christ, and the Individualized 
Divine Life that is begotten in each separate con- 
sciousness and conscience." ^ 

1 Gloria Patri, p. 103, 



THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 151 

" There is one God and Father of all," says 
Paul the Apostle, " who is over all, and through 
all, and in all." 

So far as this, it seems to me, we can go upon 
very firm ground. So much as this is contained in 
the necessary implications of coherent thought. 
We know all this, not by anybody's testimony, but 
by observing the operations of our own minds. 
And we have here the essential . truth upon which 
the doctrine of the Trinity is based. We have 
paused, we shall always do well to pause, at a long 
distance from that scholastic doctrine which de- 
scribes and defines three separate personalities co- 
operating in the work of redemption ; those ven- 
turesome philosophizings lead to very dangerous 
errors. But there is an essential threefoldness in 
the revelation to us of the divine Being ; and we 
must hold firmly to all these three terms if we wish 
to think sanely about God. He who believes only 
in an Absolute and Eternal Being, back of all phe- 
nomena, becomes an Agnostic Deist, with a faith 
as pale and cold as moonlight; there is no vital 
warmth for the soul in such a theory. He who 
believes only in the God manifested in Nature and 
History becomes a Pantheist ; with him moral dis- 
tinctions are confounded, and the personality of 
man as well as the personality of God are hope- 
lessly obscured. He who believes only in the God 
who is revealed to him in his own consciousness is 
liable to drift into a barren rationalism or a blind 
fanaticism. The solar light is the blending of 



152 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

three primary rays ; in the white light of noon we 
may not be conscious of the red, the green, or the 
violet, but they are aU. there ; if either were want- 
ing we could not see the world as it is ; those who 
look through red or green or violet glasses do not 
see true. So though we may not think of the 
threeness when we think of God, those distinctions 
lie there, implicit in our thought, and clear and 
steady reflection will bring them all to light. 

These studies may make it appear that this doc- 
trine of the Trinity is not, after all, to be dismissed 
as a mere relic of superstition. The old scholastic 
refinements concerning it are grotesque enough, no 
doubt, but there is a mighty truth underlying it. 
That there are depths here which the plummet of 
our reason fails to sound is evident enough ; who 
by searching can find out God ? 

" Holy and infinite ! viewless ! eternal ! 

Veiled in the glory that none can sustain, 
None comprehendeth thy being supernal 
Nor can the heaven of heavens contain. 

" Holy and infinite ! limitless, boundless, 

All thy perfections and powers and praise! 
Ocean of mystery ! awful and soundless 

All thine unsearchable judgments and ways ! " 

Verily we ought to walk reverently and with veiled 
faces in the presence of these mysteries of being. 
But I trust that we can see that when the glorious 
company of the apostles and the noble .army of 
martyrs and the holy church throughout the world 
lift their united voice worshiping Father, Son, and 



THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 153 

Holy Ghost, it is not whoUy an incoherent cry, but 
may be, in the minds of those who have thought 
most deeply, the utterance of a profoundly rational 
faith. 

I have not yet mentioned my own deepest reason 
for believing this doctrine. That is the testimony 
of experience. I have found that I need to know 
God under all these characters, — that each of 
these forms of revelation meets a special want of 
my mind and heart. For the satisfaction of my 
reason, for the confirmation of my faith, I need to 
know him as the Eternal Father and Creator, the 
Power behind all phienomena, the great First 
Cause from whom the universe proceeds. 

For the satisfaction of my heart's deepest crav- 
ings, I must also know him as Immanuel, God with 
us, the divinity revealed in the terms of humanity, 
the Elder Brother whose sympathy with me is per- 
fect, who stands by my side, my companion, my 
yoke-fellow, the sharer of my toil and my pain. A 
God who could not thus be manifested to me in 
the essential elements of humanity I could never 
love nor trust. 

I need, also, to believe in a God who is able to 
hold fellowship and communion with me in my 
thoughts and hopes and wishes ; one who can com- 
municate his truth and his love and his strength 
and his calmness to me in the very centres of my 
spiritual being ; with whom I can talk when my 
eyes are shut and my lips are closed, — who can 
inspire me to think clearly, to wish loftily, to strive 



154 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

nobly ; who can be with me always, in an instant, 
when my heart cries out for Him, to strengthen me 
for the conflict or the suffering of the hour. 

In all these ways I need to know Him who is my 
unseen and almighty Friend ; I do not know how 
the deepest needs of my soul could be satisfied if 
I were deprived of either of these revelations of 
God. And while I am far from wishing to set up 
any dogmatic formula of the contents of the divine 
nature to which other men's thoughts must con- 
form, I am glad that this threefold revelation of 
God is here in the Bible. I believe that all men 
who live any genuine religious life — all men of 
faith and prayer — really find God in all these 
ways that I have mentioned. Their logic may 
discard the doctrine of the Trinity, but in their 
life they lay hold of the vital truth which under- 
lies that doctrine. As proof of this let me quote 
from the " Harvard University Hymn-Book " three 
hymns by eminent Unitarians, in which these 
three aspects of Christian experience are beauti- 
fully set forth : — 

The first is by the Eev. Samuel Longfellow, 
brother of the more famous poet : — 

" God of the earth, the sky, the sea, 
Maker of all above, below, 
Creation lives and moves in thee, 

Thy present life through all doth flow. 

" Thy love is in the sunshine's glow, 
Thy life is in the quickening air ; 
When lightnings flash and storm-winds blow, 
There is thy power, thy law is there. 



THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 155 

" We feel thy calm at evening's hour, 
Thy grandeur in the march of night, 
And when the morning breaks in power, 
We hear thy word, ' Let there be Ught.' " 

The second is by Theodore Parker : — 

" Thou great Friend to all the sons of men. 
Who once appeared in humblest guise below, 
Sin to rebuke, to break the captive's chain, 

To call thy brethren forth from want and woe, — 

" Thee would I sing : thy truth is still the light 

Which guides the nations, groping on their way ; 
Stumbling and falling in disastrous night, 
Yet hoping ever for the perfect day. 

" Yes ; thou art still the life : thou art the way 

The holiest know, — light, life, and way of heaven ; 
And they who dearest hope and deepest pray. 
Toil by the light, life, way that thou hast given." 

The last is by Nathaniel L. Frothingham, once 
professor in Harvard University and long minister 
of the First Church in Boston : — 

*' God, whose presence glows in all 
Within, around us, and above, 
Thy word we bless, thy name we call. 
Whose word is truth, whose name is love. 

" That truth be with the heart believed 
Of all who seek this sacred place. 
With power proclaimed, in peace received, 
Our spirit's light, thy Spirit's grace. 

" That love its holy influence pour 

To keep us meek and make us free. 
And throw its blinding influence more 
Round each with all and all with thee. 



156 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

" Send down its angel to our side, 
Send in its calm upon the breast ; 
For we would know no other gnide, 
And we can need no other rest." 

There is no orthodox Christian who cannot pour 
out his whole heart in these Unitarian praises of 
Father, Son, and Spirit. And no Unitarian who 
sings these hymns should be too swift to deny that 
a great truth underlies the doctrine of the Trin- 
ity. When we philosophize and argue we often 
fall apart, but when we sing and pray we come 
together. Logic di^ades us, but love unites us. 
Let us argue less and worship more ; so shall we 
come, in the unity of the spirit, into the bonds of 
peace. 



VIII 

THE WOKD MADE FLESH 

The subjects whicli we have studied together 
are not easy subjects to understand ; every one of 
them brings before us some of the deep mysteries 
of existence. But they are questions which no 
thoughtful man can help asking, questions to which, 
if we would have rest for our minds, we must be 
able to give some sort of intelligent answer. It is 
not well for us to be dogmatic and intolerant of 
opinions which do not accord with our own ; but 
the effort to form some reasonable theory of our 
relation to that world of reality which lies back of 
all sensible phenomena is one that no right-minded 
man can be excused from making. We know — 
in our best moments we are deeply conscious — 
that we are not the creatures of a day ; that our 
natures have their roots in realities which lie be- 
neath the surface of things ; that our lives are fed 
by fountains beyond the reach of our senses. And 
we are not less sure that motives which spring from 
a world unseen and eternal give to human charac- 
ter its deepest significance. Not to be profoundly 
interested in these questions is to renounce our 
birthright as men, and to descend to the level of 
the foxes and the swine. 



158 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

We are now to study a Character who claimed 
to have exceptional knowledge of that unseen 
world. Whether this claim is established I will 
not now stop to inquire. But no one can dispute 
the rank of Jesus of Nazareth as a character in 
history. That a name has been given him above 
every name is not a question for discussion. Over 
the nations which have been making history dur- 
ing the past fifteen centuries he has held an un- 
questioned supremacy. His followers now far out- 
number in the world's population the adherents of 
any other form of faith, and the place which they 
occupy in the life of the world, in the march of 
civilization, is the foremost place. The problem 
which this Jesus presents to human thought is the 
most profound, the most interesting, that human 
thought has ever entertained. About him and his 
gospel and his kingdom more books have been 
written than about any other subject that has en- 
gaged the minds of men. Nor is there, even in this 
scientific age, any abatement of this interest ; the 
production of literature bearing upon his life and 
teachings was never greater than at this moment. 
Let me read to you at length, from the pen of Dr. 
Fairbairn, a well-weighed estimate of the place 
which he occupies in human history : — 

" He has left the mark of his hand on every 
generation of civilized men that has lived since he 
lived, and it would not be science to find him every- 
where and never to ask what he was aud what he 
did. Persons are the most potent factors of pro- 



THE WORD MADE FLESH 159 

gress and change in history ; and the greatest Per- 
son known to it is the one who has been the most 
powerful factor of ordered progress. Who this is 
does not lie open to dispute. Jesus Christ is a 
name that represents the most wonderful story and 
the profoundest problem on the field of history, — 
the one because the other. There is no romance so 
marvelous as the most prosaic version of his his- 
tory. The Son of a despised and hated people, 
meanly born, humbly bred, without letters, without 
opportunity, unbefriended, never, save for one brief 
and fatal moment, the idol of the crowd, opposed 
by the rich, resisted by the religious and the 
learned, persecuted unto death by the priests, de- 
stined to a life as short as it was obscure, issuing 
from his obscurity only to meet a death of unpitied 
infamy, he yet, by means of his very sufferings 
and his cross, enters upon a throne such as no 
monarch ever filled, and a dominion such as no 
Caesar ever exercised. He leads captive the civi- 
lized peoples ; they accept his words as law, though 
they confess it a law higher than human nature 
likes to obey ; they build him churches, they wor- 
ship him, they praise him in songs, interpret him 
in philosophies and theologies ; they deeply love, 
they madly hate, for his sake. It was a new thing 
in the history of the world ; for though this humble 
life was written and stood vivid before the eye and 
imagination of men, nay, because it veritably did 
so stand, they honored, loved, served him as no 
ancient deity had been honored, loved, or served. 



160 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTKINES? 

AYe may say, indeed, he was the first being who 
had realized for man the idea of the divine ; he 
proved his Godhead by making God become a 
credible, conceived, real Being to man. And all 
this was due to no temporary passion, to no tran- 
sient madness, such as now and then overtakes 
peoples as well as persons. It has been the most 
permanent thing in the history of mind ; no other 
belief has had so continuous and invariable a his- 
tory. ... Out of the story, when viewed in re- 
lation to the course of human development, rises 
for philosophy the problem. Can he, so mean in 
life, so illustrious in history, stand where he does 
by chance ? Can he, who of all persons is the 
most necessary to the orderly and progressive 
course of history, be but the fortuitous result of a 
chapter of accidents ? " ^ 

When the question is put in this way I am sure 
that we shall all admit that it is entitled to re- 
spectful consideration. Such a phenomenon as is 
presented by the life and influence of Jesus Christ 
requires explanation. I do not know that we shall 
be able to explain it, but I am sure that we shall 
not be willing to assign to it a trivial or inadequate 
cause. 

The question which at once confronts us when 
we begin to speak of Jesus Christ is the question. 
Was he human or divine ? The question generally 
assumes that an antithesis is presented : that if he 
was human he was not divine, and that if he was 
1 The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, pp. 6-8. 



THE WORD MADE FLESH 161 

divine he was not human. The irresistible propen- 
sity of the semi-educated mind to put all truth of 
life and being into two sharply discriminated cate- 
gories, and to affirm one of these and deny the 
other, comes out again in the treatment of this 
question. With many people everything is either 
up or down, either right or left, either long or short, 
either black or white, either sweet or sour ; be- 
tween these opposite poles of thought their minds 
find no resting-place ; and the thought of a higher 
unity in which contrasted truths are reconciled has 
never dawned upon them. Such minds think that 
when Jesus Christ is spoken of one must be able 
to affirm instantly that he is either human or 
divine. It is true that the orthodox church dogma 
affirms that in him two natures are combined in 
one person, that he is both God and man ; but this 
conception is feebly held by the great majority ; 
those who have believed him to be divine have con- 
sidered his humanity to be rather a semblance than 
a reality ; and those who have held him to be hu- 
man have regarded his divinity as figurative rather 
than literal. 

I must confess that the theological formula of 
two natures in one person conveys to my mind no 
clear meaning. And I greatly doubt whether 
there are two kinds of natures in the spiritual 
world, — a divine nature and a human nature. 
When Dr. Whiton says that " the moral and spir- 
itual element, which is the essential core of human- 
ity^ must be identical in nature with the moral and 



162 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

spiritual essence of Deity, else we could have no 
certainty that righteousness in man is the same 
kind of thing that it is in God," ^ I am quite un- 
able to find any flaw in the statement ; it seems to 
me indubitable. That man is another kind of a be- 
ing from God — a being with a different and con- 
trasted nature — is not, I hope, the truth. I have 
always supposed that the statement that we are 
the children of God, that we are made in his image, 
was to be accepted as substantial verity. If so, 
then there is no need of mechanically welding to- 
gether two natures in the person of Christ. He 
had his own nature ; and though he took on him 
the outward form and fashion of a man, there was 
no need of any assumption of a nature foreign to 
himself. If he possessed the divine nature he pos- 
sessed the human nature, for the two are essen- 
tially one. Was he more divine than you and I ? 
Yes ; because he was far more broadly and grandly 
human than we are, because humanity in him was 
lifted up and glorified. 

I trust that our study of the supernatural may 
have helped us a little in getting hold of this truth. 
In that discussion we saw that the natural and the 
supernatural are only different sides of the same 
thing ; that God resides in and manifests himself 
through every existence and every force of nature ; 
that nature itself, in the depths of its being, is all 
supernatural. " Whatever strides science may 
make in time to come," says Mr. lUingworth, " to- 

1 Gloria Patri, p. 55. 



THE WORD MADE FLESH 163 

wards decomposing atoms and forces into simpler 
and yet simpler elements, those elements will still 
have issued from a secret laboratory into which 
science cannot enter ; and the human mind will be 
as far as ever from knowing what they really are. 
. . . Science may resolve the complicated life of 
the material universe into a few elementary forces, 
light, heat, and electricity, and these, perhaps, into 
modifications of some simpler energy ; but of the 
origin of energy it knows no more than did the 
Greeks of old. Theology asserts that in the begin- 
ning was the Word, and in Him was life, the life of 
all things created ; in other words, that He is the 
source of all that energy whose persistent, irresist- 
ible versatility of action is forever at work mould- 
ing and clothing and peopling worlds." ^ 

Against this fundamental statement of theology, 
science has not one single word to say ; the con- 
ception gives unity and coherency to all her rea- 
sonings ; and every one of her discoveries makes the 
central truth of theology more sublimely probable. 
The whole result of science, as the writer whom I 
was just quoting goes on to say, is " in perfect har- 
mony with our Christian creed, that all things were 
made by the Eternal Reason ; but, more than this, 
it illustrates and is illustrated by the further doc- 
trine of his indwelling presence in the things of his 
creation, rendering each of them at once a revela- 
tion and a prophecy, a thing of beauty and finished 
workmanship, worthy to exist for its own sake, and 
1 Lux Mundi, pp. 156, 157. 



164 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

yet a step to higher purj^oses, an instrument for 
grander work. 

" ' God tastes an infinite joy, 
In infinite ways — one everlasting bliss, 
From whom all being emanates, all power 
Proceeds ; in whom is life for evermore, 
Yet whom existence in its lowest form 
Includes ; where dwells enjoyment, there is He : 
With still a flying point of bliss remote, 
A happiness in store afar, a sphere 
Of distant glory in full view.' " ^ 

If, now, we are able to grasp the fact that Nature 
herself is in all her origins, in all her central 
forces, supernatural, we shall not find it difficult 
to understand that humanity, in its essential na- 
ture, is divine ; that he who is perfect man is, by 
that fact, the perfect revelation of God to man. 
That Jesus Christ was the perfect Man, the ideal 
Man, is scarcely disputed by candid and reverent 
students of history. As such, he must be the man- 
ifestation of God. Does not this i^hilosophy offer 
some adequate account of the rank that he has 
taken among men, and the dominion which he has 
exercised over them ? 

The one thing we need to do is to rid ourselves 
of the disjunctive notion of the semi-educated mind, 
that the natural and the supernatural, earth and 
heaven, man and God, are antithetical terms ; that 
the one term of each of these couplets represents 
nothing that the other is and all that the other is 
not. When you ask me whether Christ was divine 
1 Lux Mundi, p. 159. 



THE WORD MADE FLESH 165 

or human it is a little like asking me whether 
the capacity of a room is due to its length or its 
width. No matter how long it may be, if it has 
not some width it will have no capacity ; and no 
matter how wide it may be, if it has not some 
length it will have no capacity. Both dimensions 
must be represented in any conceivable area. And 
the element which we call human, as well as the 
element which we call divine, must be represented 
in any spiritual being with whom it is possible for 
us to hold communion. They are different phases 
of the same sublime fact. 

The incarnation of the Son of God is not, then, 
and cannot be any unnatural event, any inter- 
ruption or dislocation of the natural order. When 
Christ said, I came not to destroy, but to fulfill the 
law, his words had a deeper meaning than any of 
his disciples were able to comprehend. He is the 
fulfillment and completion of nature, and human 
nature, not less than of the Jewish ritual. He 
brings to perfect expression the Word which was 
in the beginning, and to which nature has given, 
in the increasing purpose of the ages, an inarticu- 
late voice. 

God has been abiding in the world and manifest- 
ing himself through the world ever since the morn- 
ing of the creation. The universe is, in the deep- 
est sense, the Word of God, the revelation of his 
being. The heavens declare his glory. Day unto 
day uttereth speech concerning Him, and night 
unto night showeth knowledge. " The invisible 



166 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

things of God," says Paul, " since the creation are 
perceived through the things that are made." All 
the order of the Universe, the order revealed in the 
sublime harmonies of the solar system, and in the 
arrangement of leaves on the branches and of atoms 
in" the molecules, is the expression of mind. We 
know this, because it is all severely and precisely 
mathematical ; and what can mathematics be, if it 
is not the revelation of mind ? It is in the king- 
doms of life, however, that the presence of God is 
most clearly manifest ; for here is a subtle force 
which defies all the analytic skill of the physicists. 
And at the summit of the kingdoms of life stands 
man. Evolution shows us the process by which 
the immanent God, working unweariedly in nature, 
has brought forth this heir of the ages, and has 
prepared him by a marvelous discipline to receive 
the highest truth, and to share in the glory of the 
Father. 

" For thou hast made him but little lower than God, 

And crownest him with glory and honor, 

Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands, 

Thou hast put all things under his feet, 

All sheep and oxen, 

Yea, and the beasts of the field ; 

The fowl of the air and the fish of the sea, 

Whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas." 

With the appearance of man we see the work 
of creation approaching its goal. The organism, 
through long stages of growth and improvement, is 
at last fitted for the inbreathing of self-conscious 
life, and the life is there ready to be imparted. 



THE WORD MADE FLESH 167 

Every stage of this development has witnessed the 
communication of some higher revelation of God ; 
till at length the spirit, made in the image of God 
himself, is tabernacled in the flesh. Man is no 
more a creature, nor a servant, but a son. He is 
made in the image of the Father ; he is intelligent, 
conscious, free ; God has endowed him with his 
own spiritual attributes ; he is fitted for commun- 
ion and fellowship with God. 

If, now, God is immanent in the creation, it is 
evident that the signs of his presence must be most 
clear in humanity, which is the crown of the crea- 
tion. In humanity God must be most distinctly 
manifested. And this is, beyond all question, the 
scriptural idea, and the idea which has always 
guided the thought of the Christian church. 

But the question arises. How much of God is 
thus revealed in nature and in humanity? His 
power, his wisdom, his patience, his beauty, in 
some sense also his beneficence, have been found in 
nature by devout students ; but it has often been 
supposed that his mercy and forgivingness are not 
there revealed ; that for the knowledge of these 
we must go to the Bible. But the Bible itself is 
our warrant for denying this doctrine. The mercy 
that endureth forever must have been known be- 
fore men learned to write. And Paul tells us that 
not only God, but the Christ of God is immanent 
in the creation ; that those divine attributes of pity 
and clemency and mercy which Jesus reveals in 
his life and death are part of the groundwork of 



168 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTEINES ? 

nature, the very roots out of which the whole life 
of the world has grown ; so that the Word, which 
Christ himself was, was indeed in the beginning 
with God, and all things were made through him — 
came into being, as it were, through the channels 
of. Christliness.^ Thus the agelong process of evo- 
lution has been steadily developing in the creation 
the Christly elements, — the elements of love and 
self-sacrifice ; and men in all lands have seen the 
Christ in nature and in human nature, and have 
known that God was merciful and gracious, and 
have trusted in Him and found peace and salva- 
tion. 

The advent of the Son of man is then no sudden 
break in the order of nature, but the culmination 
and completion of the revelation of God. As Dr. 
Dale, the great English Congregational theologian 
has written, Christ's incarnation is not "an iso- 
lated and abnormal wonder. It was God's witness 
to the true and ideal relation of all men to God." 
Or as another says, " The historic hour when the 
Word became flesh, we call by preeminence the 
Incarnation, since in Christ the Divine Word finds 
fullest utterance. But it is no detached event ; it 
is the issue of an eternal process of utterance, the 
Word ' whose goings forth,' as Micah said, ' have 
been from everlasting.' Still it is true that to 
Christ suiwemely belongs the name of Son which 
includes all the life that is begotten of God. He 
is the beloved and unique representative of this 
1 Col. i. 15-17. 



THE \yORD MADE FLESH 169 

universal sonship ; '■ the firstborn ,' as Paul said, 
'q/* all creation.' Worthiest to bear the name of 
the Son of God in a preeminent but not exclusive 
right is he. Xot only has he revealed to orphaned 
men their partnership with him in the life and love 
of the All Father. His peerless distinction as the 
Son is that in him shine at their brightest those 
moral glories which belong to the very crown of 
Deity." i 

What need was there of this fidler manifesta- 
tion ? 

What need was there that the century plant, 
long years growing, loDg years maturing, hold- 
ing all the while the secret of its life in its 
heart, should come at length to perfect flower ? 
The life of the plant in bloom is the same life 
that was in the plant through the slow years of 
its growth, but who would have known its real na- 
ture if it had not, in the fullness of time, lifted u]) 
to the light that erect and towering scape, and 
flimg to the breeze its mighty profusion of bloom ? 

What need was there in the loag summer twi- 
lio^ht that the sun should rise ? The lioht that first 
touched with ivory fingers the eastern horizon, be- 
fore the birds awoke, — the light that slowly grew, 
from the faintest dawn, until shapes and colors 
slowly disclosed themselves, and the drij^ping 
leaves and the freshly bathed flowers stood waiting 
for the glory to be revealed, — was the light of the 
sun, none other ; why, if we have some glimmer of 
1 Gloria Patri, p. 92. 



170 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

that light, by which in the gloaming we may grope 
along our path, should there be any need on earth 
of the sun's rejoicing ray ? 

I think that my questions answer yours. There 
is always need that life shall complete itself. It is 
the one supremely needful thing. The moral im- 
perative springs directly out of that need. As one 
has said, " The evident end of any being is to 6e, 
according to the nature given to him. If the rose 
does not blossom, if the bee does not fly and gather 
honey, we say they have not fulfilled their desti- 
nies." That need is a part of the very nature of 
things. Humanity, as truly as the century plant, 
needs to come to perfect flower. Such a need is 
inherent in itself, as the highest type of being in 
the creation. 

But there is a deeper need here, to the under- 
standing of which we do not attain by studying the 
life of the plant. The century plant has in itself 
its own impulse to complete its life ; but its pro- 
gress toward perfection may be greatly assisted. 
If the gardener knows the nature of this plant, 
knows what it is in its perfection, he knows how to 
work and how to wait for that perfection. Unless 
he does know this, his labor of cultivation may be 
misdirected, may be abandoned before the plant 
has come to flower. The ideal of the plant must 
be before his mind in order that his treatment of 
it may be intelligent. 

Now every man has in himself this double life. 
He is both plant and gardener. He has a nature 



THE WORD MADE FLESH 171 

to be developed and perfected ; he has an intelli- 
gence and a will by which this perfection is to be 
secured. Therefore he must know what human 
perfection is, in order that his work to secure it 
may be wisely directed. He must see humanity in 
perfect flower, in order that he may comprehend 
his own humanity in its completeness. If the evi- 
dent " end of any being is to be," how evident is 
the necessity that any being to whom, in some 
large measure, its own destiny is committed, should 
be able to conjugate, in all its moods and tenses, 
that great verb to he; how evident the necessity 
that every man should somehow have before him, 
for his guidance, the figure of the perfect man ! 

Man is always an idealist. He is not merely 
impelled, as the plant is, by forces which he can- 
not resist ; he is led and allured by visions that go 
before him and that beckon him on. All his real 
gains are made by his voluntary pursuit of the 
ideals thus presented to his choice. It is not by 
what he is driven to do that he wins perfection, but 
by what he aims to do, and strives to do. Herein 
resides the very secret of his manhood. And hence 
arises the need that there should be clearly revealed 
and manifested to him the end at which he ought 
to aim, the perfection for which he is bound to 
strive. 

It was needful, therefore, that the life should be 
manifested; that the Word should become flesh 
and dwell among us, that we might behold his 
glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the 



172 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

Father, fuU of grace and truth. The advent of 
the Son of man had relations to the world's sin 
and the world's need of which we shall treat in 
another chapter. His work in the world was con- 
ditioned by the world's suffering and woe. But if 
the shadow of sin had never fallen upon this 
planet, that perfect manifestation of the divine 
humanity which he was would surely have been 
made to men. The Word which was spoken in 
the beo'innino- and which, under its threefold si"'- 
nificance of Law and Life and Love, had been 
finding faint and incoherent utterance through the 
ages, must at length have come to such clear artic- 
ulation as it found in the life of Him who was, in 
a measure that no other of mortals could claim to 
be, both Son of man and Son of God. 

Let us gather up the strands of this discus- 
sion : — 

1. God is in his world, and has been since the 
morning of the Creation, visible there to the pure in 
heart. The immanent God is the Life of all life. 

2. Christ is in his world, and has been since the 
morning of the Creation. The Word was in the 
beginning with God. All things were made 
throuo'h him : all thino-s that live have in them- 

o - o 

selves the elements of Christliness. Love and self- 
sacrifice are at the very heart of nature. 

3. This Word of God, the Word of sympathy, 
of mercy, of forgivingness, has been struggling into 
speech from the beginning ; many have dimly un- 
derstood it, and found salvation by trusting in it. 



THE WORD MADE FLESH 173 

4. In tlie fullness of time, in Jesus of Nazareth 
the Word was made flesh. In him, for the first 
and only time in history, the Word of God found 
clear and perfect articulate expression. He was 
the ideal man, the consummation and the crown of 
humanity, and therefore he was the manifestation 
of God. 

" Deep strike tliy roots, heavenly Vine, 
Within our earthly sod, 
Most human, and yet most divine, 
The flower of man and God." 



HOW CHEIST SAVES MEN 

The doctrine of the Atonement is generally- 
regarded as the central doctrine of the evangelical 
system, and a brief sketch of the history of this 
doctrine would be instructive to those who imagine 
that orthodoxy, in the words of Vincent of Lerins, 
is that which has been believed "always, every- 
where, and by all." This idea of the immutability 
of Christian doctrine will scarcely survive even 
a cursory reading of any history of dogma. The 
forms through which belief has passed are many 
and various. Evolution may lack credentials in 
the kingdoms of physical life, but here in theology 
its reign is undisputed. All the great facts v/ith 
which the Darwinian theory makes us familiar — 
variation, hereditary transmission, natural (in this 
case spiritual) selection, and the survival of the 
fittest — stand out in the clearest light on this field 
of dogmatics. 

The tendency to produce multitudinous varieties 
of belief on all these subjects is always present; 
these beliefs at once come into conflict and there 
is a struggle for life among them ; those survive 
which are most in harmony with their environ- 



HOW CHRIST SAVES MEN 175 

ment. The great fact is, moreover, that the en- 
vironment is the Christian consciousness of the 
church, which is more and more pervaded by 
the spirit of Christ. The spiritual progress of the 
kingdom of God is carried forward in the realm 
of the affections ; the gentleness and patience and 
purity of Christ are communicated from life to life ; 
the parable of the leaven is in constant course of 
verification. It is thus that the world grows bet- 
ter, and the theories of the thinkers, subjected to 
the acceptance of this purified Christian conscious- 
ness, are constantly modified for the better ; their 
crudities and immoralities are gradually winnowed 
away ; loftier conceptions, worthier ideals, find ex- 
pression in them. Every century drops some forms 
of dogmatic statement, because they have become 
repugnant to the moral sense of the people, or in- 
credible to their wider intellectual vision. This is 
the process which a stupid conservatism vainly 
seeks to arrest. It is common to hear modifica- 
tions of this nature attributed to satanic agency ; 
the truth being that these are proofs of the living 
presence of God in his church and in his world. 
It is what He has been doing in the hearts and the 
lives of men that has made these changes necessary. 
The history of the doctrine of the Atonement will 
make this plain. 

In the first two or three centuries there was but 
little theorizing about the work of Christ. Those 
old Fathers recognized Christ as a Saviour ; they 
trusted him, and followed him, and found the way 



176 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

to peace and strength by a living fellowship with 
him. As to the explanation of all this they did 
not seem to care. Irenaeus, who taught in the last 
half of the second century, says that through sin 
man had become alienated from God, and that 
Christ became man in order to reunite God and 
man. The theoretical fabric in this teaching is 
slio:ht. Christ redeems us and reconciles us to 
God, but just how he does not try to tell. He 
does, however, use the word " ransom," — a word 
which was destined in the next thousand years to 
play a large part in the development of the theory 
of the Atonement. So far as the early church had 
a theory of the work of Christ, this theory of ran- 
som was most widely accepted as the explanation. 
There were those who criticised it as morally un- 
sound, but their objections did not prevail. 

The theory is based on a word which Jesus used 
once, when he said, " The Son of man came not to 
be ministered unto but to minister, and to give his 
life a ransom for many ; " and which Paul used 
once, when he spoke of Jesus as having given him- 
self as "a ransom for all" (1 Tim. ii. 6). The 
words "redeem" and " redemption " do, however, 
convey the same idea, and they are found fre- 
quently in the New Testament. A ransom is a 
sum of money paid to a captor for the release of a 
captive or prisoner. He who pays the ransom is 
called the redeemer; the act is redemption. When 
Christ, or the blood of Christ, began to be spoken 
of as a ransom, those who wished to understand the 



HOW CHRIST SAVES MEN 177 

meaning of the words they were using began to ask 
to whom this ransom was paid, and who paid it. 
The answer, whicli was first spoken rather hesitat- 
ingly, but afterward came to be affirmed with con- 
fidence, was that the ransom was given to Satan, 
and that it was paid him by God, for the release 
of the human race from bondage to the Prince of 
Evil. The theory was that man by the fall had 
passed under the power of the devil. The devil 
had thus gained a legal right to humanity, a right 
which God himself was bound to resjDect. To dis- 
possess him of his captives a ransom must be paid. 
Satan accepted the person of Christ as the ransom, 
and thus lost his claim upon the race. As formu- 
lated in the fourth century by Gregory of Nyssa, 
Hagenbach thus summarizes it : " Men have become 
slaves of the devil by sin. Jesus offered himself to 
the devil as the ransom which should release all 
others. The crafty devil assented because he cared 
more for this one Jesus, so much superior to them, 
than for all the rest. But notwithstanding his 
craft he was deceived, since he could not retain 
Jesus in his power. It was, as it were, a deception 

on the part of God (^a-rrdTr) rtg eo-rt rpoirov nva) that 

Jesus veiled his divine nature, which the devil would 
have feared, by means of his humanity, and thus 
deceived the devil by the appearance of flesh. But 
Gregory allows such a deception according to the 
lex talionis ; the devil had first deceived men, for 
the purpose of seducing them ; but the design of 
God in deceiving the devil was a good one, viz., to 



178 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

redeem mankind. Gregory's argument looks very 
mucli like the well-known maxim that 'the end 
justifies the means.' This dramatic representation 
of the subject includes, however, that other more 
profound idea, carried out with much ingenuity in 
many of the wondrous legends of the Middle Ages, 
that the devil, notwithstanding his subtilty, is at 
last outwitted by the wisdom of God, and appears 
in the comparison as a stupid devil." ^ 

That, by the way, is a very profound truth. It 
is the beginning of wisdom to believe that the devil 
is a fool, that is to say, that concentrated selfish- 
ness and malice is the essence of stupidity. So far 
these old theologians were right. But what a con- 
ception is this of the work of salvation! What 
kind of moral sense had the men who could con- 
ceive of God as entering into a transaction of this 
sort ? What kind of a deity is this who is reduced 
to the necessity of playing a sharp trick to get the 
advantage of the devil ? The figures used by these 
theologians are so grotesque that it is difficult to 
quote them without incurring the charge of treat- 
ing sacred themes with levity. But it is needful 
that we should know through what phases of human 
misconception and moral confusion this truth of 
the Atonement has passed. One of the favorite 
figures was that of the fish-hook. The divine 
nature of Christ was the hook ; his human nature 
— his flesh — was the bait ; Satan bit at the bait 
without seeing the hook. Peter Lombard prefers 

1 History of Doctrine, § 134. 



HOW CHRIST SAVES MEN 179 

the figure of a trap, of which the flesh was the bait. 
The general conception is that Satan was in some 
way outwitted in the transaction. This man Christ 
Jesus was undermining his kingdom ; he must get 
possession of him as his archenemy ; to secure him 
he was willing to let go his legal claim on the race, 
and when he had secured him he could not hold 
him ; he could torture and kill his body, but the 
divine nature escaped his clutches, and rose from 
the dead to lead the emancipated race out of its 
bondage. 

Origen varies this interpretation by explaining 
the escape of Christ from the power of the devil as 
a moral rather than a miraculous transaction. It 
was not because his divinity overpowered the ad- 
versary that he got free ; it was because his nature 
was Love, and the devil could not endure the pre- 
sence of a benevolent spirit and was glad to let him 
go. Some of the later Fathers explain the Atone- 
ment, not as a ransom, but as a combat between 
Christ and Belial, in which the latter was worsted 
and compelled to surrender his prey. This is not, 
in their conception, a merely figurative battle, but 
a real duel, in which the Son of God was victorious 
over the Prince of this world. 

For fully a thousand years this idea of the Atone- 
ment as consisting in the rescue of the human race 
from the dominion of the devil, either by outwitting 
or overpowering him, was the prevailing theory in 
the church. There were men who did not wholly 
accept it, men to whom its moral crudity was 



180 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

repulsive ; but the great majority of devout people 
knew no other explanation of the work of Christ, 
and to call in question this account of his mission 
exposed one to the gravest suspicions of heresy. 
When Abelard, in the twelfth century, ventured 
to question whether the devil really had any rights 
in the human race, and whether any such transac- 
tion as this for their release ever took place, that 
great hero of the faith, St. Bernard, declared that a 
man who disputed a doctrine so essential as this 
should not be reasoned with, but chastised with 
rods. 

Nevertheless, the explanation gradually became 
incredible. As men's ideas of justice and honor 
and probity were elevated and purified, it became 
evident that the relations and motives and prac- 
tices ascribed to God in these theories were impos- 
sible. The explanation ceased to explain. It in- 
volved the whole subject in darkness rather than 
light. 

Other explanations were attempted. Chief 
among these was that of Anselm. In this theory 
the devil wholly disappears ; the figure of ransom 
is dropped, and the figure of debt takes its place. 
Obedience is the honor which man owes to God ; 
the disobedience of the race has involved human- 
kind in hopeless debt. For past sin present obedi- 
ence cannot atone ; how can that debt be cleared 
away ? Christ as the God man perfectly obeys the 
law ; to that he was bound. But his sinless death 
was not due ; no obligation required that of him ; 



HOW CHRIST SAVES MEN 181 

and by giving his life lie wrought a great work of 
supererogation and accumulated a fund of surplus 
merit, infinite in amount, out of which he pays 
the debts of all believers. This is known as the 
commercial theory. In Anselm's exposition it is 
somewhat less bald than in my abbreviated state- 
ment, yet in its best form it is a dismal travesty 
of the great fact which it seeks to explain. How 
can one moral being, by unmerited suffering, accu- 
mulate a fund of virtue out of which the moral ob- 
ligations of other moral beings can be discharged ? 
Moral obligations cannot be transferred from one 
to another after this manner. Yet this theory 
lingers in some of our hymns, and still vitiates 
much of our thinking on this transcendent theme. 

Following this came the purely legal conception, 
— the theory of a legal or penal substitution. 
The penalty of sin is death ; all men have sinned 
and are exposed to the penalty ; Christ volun- 
tarily endures the penalty, in our stead, and thus 
secures our salvation. This theory made room for 
Universalism. The original Universalists argued 
that sin could not be punished twice ; and that 
since Christ bore the penalty for all, all must go 
free. That seems a logical inference. The later 
Universalists, I need not say, have based their 
belief in the final salvation of all men upon other 
reasonings than these. 

There has always been difficulty in explaining 
this theory. To begin with, the transfer of pen- 
alty is essentially unjust and unmoral. That the 



182 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

substitute consents does not acquit the judge of 
injustice. Governments can tolerate no sucli trans- 
actions. Moreover, we are told that the penalty of 
sin is death. What kind of death ? All kinds 
of death, the answer is ; everj'thing that the word 
means, — physical, spiritual, and eternal death. 
Did Christ suffer all these ? Yes, said some of 
the old theologians. They would follow their logic. 
His body died on the cross ; he was separated 
from God and left in utter spiritual darkness ; he 
suffered the literal pains of hell in his soul. Lu- 
ther said that Christ became, for our sakes, a thief, 
a murderer, an adulterer, and took the whole pen- 
alty of the law upon himself. 

But from this horrible doctrine men began to 
revolt. That Christ could have actually endured 
the penalty of our sins was incredible. Part 
of the penalty of sin — the bitterest part of it — 
is remorse : could he have felt remorse ? In what 
sense could the pains of hell have been inflicted 
on him ? There never was a moment when his 
thought was not pure, when his conscience was 
not clear, when his heart was not full of love to 
every creature. Can such a spirit suffer the pains 
of hell ? The real penalty of sin is spiritual death, 
and that means depraved appetites, unbridled pas- 
sions, groveling animalism, rampant selfishness, 
disinterested malice. This is the condition which 
sin bringeth forth when it is finished. Is it not 
monstrous to say that Jesus Christ ever experi- 
enced anything like this ? If he did not, then it 



HOW CHRIST SAVES MEN 183 

is absurd to say that he suffered the penalty of sin: 
This theory, in its turn, became incredible. Men 
saw that all moral standards were confounded and 
perverted by saying that Christ endured the pen- 
alty of the law as our substitute. It was not the 
penalty of the law ; it could not have been, they 
said ; it must have been something else ; what 
was it ? 

To this the great Dutch jurist, Grotius, made 
reply in what has since been known as the gov- 
ernmental theory, that the sufferings inflicted on 
Christ were not penal, but illustrative. They are 
intended as an impressive exhibition of God's 
hatred of sin. To the spectacle of the cross God 
seems to be pointing all sinners, saying to them, 
" Thus ought you to suffer. This Being does not 
deserve to suffer, and his sufferings do not signify 
any wrath on my part ; but he has consented to 
endure them, and I am inflicting them upon him, 
in the presence of the universe, in order that all 
may see how greatly I abhor sin." 

This theory was meant to relieve the imputation 
upon the justice of God involved in the theory of 
penal substitution. To some minds it still affords 
such relief. But there are many who have ceased 
to find any satisfaction in it. If it is not unmoral, 
it is essentially unreal — even theatrical. To treat 
one who is not a sinner as though he were a sinner, 
in order that sinners may see how they ought to be 
treated, does not seem to comport with the dignity 
and directness of the divine administration. To 



184 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTFJNES ? 

many miDds this explanation lias ceased to be 
credible. 

For myself I must say that all these attempts to 
interpret the work of Christ by judicial and foren- 
sic and governmental analogies seem to me very 
lame and impotent. Governmental figures may be 
used in dealing with them, if only we remember 
that they are figures, and do not proceed to harden 
them into theories. The apostles use these figures ; 
aspects of the work of salvation may be shadowed 
forth by them. But when we attempt to make 
philosophical formularies out of them we are as far 
astray as one would be who undertook to deduce 
the anatomy of a skylark from Shelley's poem. 
In truth the ethical and spiritual values with which 
we are concerned in trying to tell what Christ has 
done for men can never be expressed in terms of 
human jurisprudence. When we reason from what 
such human rulers as we know think it expedient 
for them to do in dealing with offenders, to what 
the Infinite Wisdom and Love will do in reclaimino^ 
his wandering children we are not going on firm 
ground. Many things are authorized by legisla- 
tures and done by courts and magistrates which 
the Eternal Justice could never tolerate. In all our 
criminal courts, for example, penalty may be com- 
muted with money. There are many offenses for 
which the rich man goes free, while the poor man 
goes to jail. He who possesses or can borrow the 
money to pay his fine walks abroad ; he who has 
neither purse nor friend must submit to the treat- 



HOW CHRIST SAVES MEN 185 

ment of a malefactor. This whole institution of 
fines is utterly and abominably unjust, albeit we 
call it justice. The day will come when we shall 
abolish all such iniquities, and when the rich man 
will be compelled to take the same kind of pun- 
ishment that the poor man must endure. But 
such ethical anomalies still appear in our jurisj)ru- 
dence ; and it is precisely upon conditions of this 
sort that some of the forensic theories of the Atone- 
ment are founded. We ought to be admonished 
that such analogies will lead us astray. 

Indeed, it should be said that all the recent mas- 
ters in theological science have abandoned these 
governmental theories as inadequate. I have been 
looking over Professor Fisher's abstracts of the 
teaching of such great evangelical theologians as 
Nitzsch and Rothe and Julius Miiller, and I can- 
not find that any of them teach that the sufferings 
of Christ were judicially inflicted upon him by the 
Father, for the vindication of justice or the confir- 
mation of government. To show how greatly the 
view of the church has changed, let me quote a few 
words from the last Professor of Systematic The- 
ology in Andover, Professor George Harris : — 

" The doctrine which has undergone the greatest 
modification from purely ethical influences is the 
doctrine of redemption from sin. Until recently 
the usual representations of atonement were justly 
open to the charge of immorality. Even now such 
representations continue to be made to a consider- 
able degree. The moral sense is shocked at some 



186 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

of the reasons given for atonement. The imputa- 
tion of our sins to Christ has been so stated that it 
seemed as if all regard for righteousness had been 
overlooked. The penal suffering of Christ was 
regarded as the philosophy of atonement. It was 
believed that God laid on Christ the penalty of our 
sins, or a suffering equivalent to that penalty. 
The atonement was represented as an arrangement 
satisfactory to God, but incomprehensible to us. 
The fact that character and its consequences can- 
not be transferred from one person to another was 
contradicted by the theory that Christ suffered 
what we otherwise should have suffered. . . . The 
love of Christ making its great way to men at the 
cost of suffering is the motive which leads men to 
repentance, but has been represented as the motive 
which induces God to forgive. This disappearing 
theory fails to satisfy because it is immoral, be- 
cause it places salvation Somewhere else than in 
character, because it converts the sympathy and 
love of Christ into legal fictions, because it places 
the ethical demands of justice above the ethical 
necessities of love. It is, indeed, through the self- 
sacrifice of Christ that we are recovered from self- 
ishness to goodness and love. He bore our sins. 
He suffered on account of our sins. He brings us 
back to God, for he reveals God to us in his real 
character. But that is very different from mercan- 
tile or forensic transference of the penalty of sin 
from one person to another. When the doctrine of 
atonement is traced through its successive phases, 



HOW CHRIST SAVES MEN 187 

as a ransotn paid to the devil, as the satisfaction of 
justice, as the vindication of divine government, 
and finally as the great motive power which trans- 
forms character, it is seen that there has been a 
progressive moral evolution. The doctrine of re- 
demption through sacrifice remains, but is no longer 
made to rest on an unethical philosophy.'' ^ 

It is evident that not much is left of the theories 
of the Atonement which the church has fabricated 
through the centuries. But the fact may remain 
though the theories pass. There have been a 
good many theories of light since the days of Par- 
menides of Elea, most of which have gone into the 
junk-pile of the discarded philosophies : but the 
light of heaven is just as blessed a reality to-day 
as it was when the Magians worshiped it upon 
the Persian hills, and the poets praised its beauty 
on the sunny plains of ancient Greece. And it is 
well to remember that while doctrines change their 
forms, just as the natural forces do, the essential 
truth which they embody endures from generation 
to generation. There are many transformations of 
spiritual and moral energy, as they appear in the 
intellectual world, but there is also a conservation 
of energy. The people who witness the transfor- 
mation of the mode often imagine that they are 
witnessing an extinction of the force, and go away 
shouting that Christianity is dead. No man is apt 
to be more utterly oblivious of the great facts 
of evolution than your rampant religious radical. 
1 Moral Evolution, pp. 407, 408. 



188 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

His notion is that progress consists in an intermin- 
able series of blottings out and fresh beginnings ; 
the manner in which one thing grows out of an- 
other, in which life and thought are conserved by 
changes of form and transmitted from one genera- 
tion to another and from one institution to another, 
he is totally incapable of conceiving. The last 
man to understand the doctrine of evolution ap- 
pears to be the religious teacher who assumes that 
he has a monopoly of liberalism. 

The forms of the doctrine of the Atonement have 
greatly changed, no doubt ; but under these forms 
precious and immutable truths abide. I cannot at 
this time enter into the interpretation of the Scrip- 
ture texts which have been supposed to teach the 
doctrine of expiation ; but one principle of inter- 
pretation may be suggested which will throw light 
on many of them. There is a common mode of 
speech by which our own feelings are attributed to 
objects outside of ourselves ; as when we speak of a 
cheerful room, meaning that there is something in 
the appearance of the room which makes us feel 
cheerful; or when we speak of a dizzy height, 
meaning that we are dizzy when we stand upon it. 
The objective is thus often put for the subjective. 
What is in our own feeling, we transfer to the object 
which excites it. There is the common phenomenon 
of parallax, also, by which the heavens seem to 
move, when it is we who are moving. The star 
that was over our right shoulder a little while ago 
is now over our left shoulder; it seems to have 



HOW CHRIST SAVES MEN 189 

moved through a large arc ; but the truth is that 
there has been a turning in our road. So men 
naturally ascribe to God changes that have taken 
place in themselves. They were disobedient and 
had the consciousness of alienation from Him ; they 
are now in filial relations with Him, and it is natu- 
ral for them to think that the frown upon his face 
has changed into a smile, that wrath has turned to 
love. But the change is not in Him ; it is in them- 
selves. They may speak of his anger being ap- 
peased, because that describes their own feeling. 
The relation has changed, but the change is in 
them. And the Scriptures often take up this natu- 
ral and popular way of speaking, and represent 
God as being angry and having his anger turned 
away. Such expressions must be taken for just 
what they are worth, as the natural and familiar 
forms of human speech, not as scientific statements 
of the truth about God. 

What is it, then, that Jesus Christ has done for 
us men and our salvation ? 

First he has revealed God to us. Whatever else 
we may say about him, this must be admitted by 
all who have any faith in his words, in what he 
said about himself, that he was the revelation or 
manifestation of the living God to men. He said 
of himself what no other sane man has ever said, 
" I and my Father are one." He came to show us 
the Father. " He that hath seen me," he said, 
" hath seen the Father." What he says and does 
and suffers represents to us the divine thought and 



190 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

feeling respecting our sins, our needs, and our de- 
stinies. 

This revelation which is made in the person of 
Jesus Christ brings God very near to us. We see 
this Son of God entering into all our human ex- 
periences, toiling, hungering, thirsting, rejoicing, 
weeping ; we hear him calling himself the Son of 
man, and it is borne into our minds that the chasm 
which our thought had made between divinity and 
humanity does not exist > that we are, indeed, what 
Jesus always calls us, the children of our Father in 
heaven. 

This identification of himself with us is such a 
revelation of God's love for us as never could have 
been made in any other way. For it involves con- 
stant suffering and sacrifice, — self-sacrificCo And 
the only convincing manifestation of love is that 
which is revealed in self-sacrifice. " Surely he 
hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." 
We cannot doubt his sympathy with us, his com- 
passion for us. Such a revelation of love is fitted 
to overcome the enmity and alienation of the human 
heart, and to bring men back to God in contrition 
and trust. 

But the sufferings of Christ reveal something 
more than the love of God for men, they reveal 
also his hatred of sin. For in order that men may 
be saved, it is needful not only that they be enabled 
to understand God's love for them, but also that 
they be taught to share his wrath against the sin 
which is destroying them. To human beings in 



HOW CHRIST SAVES MEN 191 

their present environment these two experiences 
are essential to salvation, — love of the good and 
hatred o£ the evil. I cannot save myself unless I 
hate the wrong in myself as cordially as I love the 
right. I cannot save my fellow man unless I have 
the same wrath against the evil that is destroying 
him. In order that we may be restored to commun- 
ion with a holy God we must recoil from the sin 
which He abhors as cordially as we draw nigh to 
the purity and truth which He loves. Jesus Christ, 
as the manifestation of God, brings this truth home 
to the hearts of men with saving power. This sub- 
ject is so vast that we cannot, within the limits of 
one short chapter, get a,nything more than a glimpse 
of it. An illustration used by Dr. J. M. Whiton 
may suggest the truth : — 

"We see a loving wife, cleaving to her drunken 
husband to save him at all cpst to herself. She 
might be comfortable in her father's house, but she 
makes herself the redeeming partner of a squalid 
life whose evil temper she bears, whose polluted 
breath she breathes, while she feels in every fibre of 
her suffering spirit the woe and shame. Through 
this vicarious suffering perhaps she accomplishes 
her redeeming work, rouses the torpid conscience 
to conviction, repentance, reparation. What is it 
then which educates and energizes his conscience ? 
The evil consequences of his sin, not to him, hut to 
her. It is her vicarious sacrifice, not in his stead, 
but in his place, luith him, as well as for him, that 
gives his conscience the just estimate of his sin, and 



192 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

clothes it with power to break the accursed chain. 
Thus Christ ' hore our sins^^ in fellowship with us, 
not in substitution for us. The vicarious suffering 
which we in various ways bear with and for one 
another, he bore for all sinners as their redeeming 
partner in the retributive evils of their sin, to rouse, 
teach, energize conscience to an invincible hatred 
of it and a victorious struggle with it. But this 
is not the propitiation of conscience ; rather is it 
preparatory thereto. 

" For when we contemplate our sin with a thor- 
oughly awakened conscience, what truly contrite 
spirit is there who does not feel, with the tender- 
hearted and penitent child, that he cannot he sorry 
enough f There is not only the overt act of sin to 
be condemned. There is also the evil root of it in 
the evil dispositions and habits which the overt sin 
has fostered. There is more sin within us than 
shows at any moment. Our feelings seem too dull. 
Our confessions seem too weak. AVe crave a power 
of expression we do not find within us, to bind upon 
our sin the burden of condemnation it deserves in 
the judgment of the Father we have grieved and 
offended. 

" Consider now the case of him whom the long- 
snffering constancy of conjugal devotion has awak- 
ened from drunken dreams, and reclaimed from 
sottish squalor, and rehabilitated in sober man- 
hood. It is not enough for him to pour upon his 
vices merel}^ Ms oicn detestation. He longs to 
condemn his sin with such execration as only an 



HOW CHRIST SAVES MEN 193 

unstained virtue can cherish for it. Such hatred 
of it as only she can feel whose purity has for his 
sake endured contact with its pollution he fain 
would borrow from her and share with her. Put- 
ting himself into her place he endeavors to think 
her thought, to feel her feeling about it. Nor does 
he feel that in her view he has made the atonement 
of an adequate repentance until, in the full accord 
of their mutual love and moral sympathy, her abhor- 
rence of his sin has become his own. Then at last 
he is satisfied because she is satisfied. And if he 
should say, How can I ever make amends? she 
would reply. You have made all the amends I ever 
sought. You are at one with me. I am satisfied to 
see you abhor your sin as I abhor it. Thus is she 
his propitiation. Thus we may approach the con- 
ception of that propitiation in conscience which is 
the atoning work of Christ." 

This is only a fragment, an outline, I know, of 
that great work of spiritual revelation, and recon- 
ciliation, and renovation which is wrought out for 
us and in us in the life and the sufferings of Him 
who came to show us the Father and to save us 
from our sins. But it may help us to see that 
there is something more in this work of Christ than 
the mere exhibition of pity for us. The abhorrence 
of the sin that curses us is not less clearly shown. 
It was this that broke his heart in Gethsemane. 
No being less pure than Jesus could have felt as 
he felt the onset of the world's selfishness and 
madness, then rushing upon him to destroy him, 



194 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

simply because lie was unselfish and sane. He 
could not but have been overwhelmed with abhor- 
rence of the terrible outbreak of the sin of the 
world which he was there confronting. Yet he 
loved the men who were seeking his life, and 
longed to save them. It was this struggle between 
the suffering of a pure spirit on account of sin and 
the love that cannot let the sinner go which wrung 
from him the bloody sweat of the garden. This 
was the true divine propitiation, — the reconcil- 
iation through suffering of holiness with love. 
And it is by bringing us into the same mind with 
himself ; by filling us with his own abhorrence of 
sin ; by bringing us to look upon the selfishness 
and animalism of our own lives with his eyes, and 
to recoil from them as he recoiled from them, that 
he saves us. " The world's unrighteousness," says 
the great German theologian Carl Immanuel Nitzsch, 
" spends itself upon the Holy and Righteous One, 
completes and exhausts itself. He endures it, in 
the glory of his innocence, in order by his spirit 
to punish it upon us. Only as the power and possi- 
bility of an actual release from sin, of our d3'ing 
with Him and rising in a new life, does he suffer 
death in our place and make himself an offering to 
God. Only thus is he a ransom for many. It is 
in the depths of his sympathy and in the endeavor 
for the world's salvation that he bears the penalty 
of its sin."i 

Here are elements with which we must reckon 

^ Quoted by Fisher, Hist. Christian Doctrine, p. 516. 



HOW CHRIST SAVES MEN 195 

in all our dealings with the evil in ourselves, in all 
our efforts to save others. Gethsemane is the 
warning against an easy, good-natured theory of 
moral evil. We must not go about telling our- 
selves that we are pretty good fellows after all, and 
that God is so infinitely benevolent that He does 
not greatly care about our meannesses and iniqui- 
ties. No ! We must see our sin as Christ sees it ; 
we must hate it as he hated it. Dr. Lyman Abbott 
is right when he says : " We shall never enter into 
the mystery of redemption unless we enter in some 
measure into these two experiences of wrath and 
pity and into the mystery of their reconciliation, 
. . . The Old Theology has grievously erred in 
personifying these two experiences, in attributing 
all the hate and wrath to the Father and all the 
pity and compassion to the Son. But the New 
Theology will still more grievously err if it leaves 
either the wrath or the pity out of its estimate of 
the divine nature, or fails to see and teach that 
reconciliation is the reconciliation of a great pity 
with a great wrath, the issue of which is a great 
mercy and a great redemption." ^ 

1 The Theology of an Evolutionist^ p. 121. 



PREDESTINATION 

Probably no other doctrine of theology has oc- 
cupied so large a place in the thought of the mod- 
ern church as that which we are now to consider. 
What with affirming it and denying it, modifying 
it and explaining it, trying to believe it and trying 
to disbelieve it, finding comfort in it and falling 
into despair" in view of it, a great many millions 
of believers have spent a large share of their intel- 
lectual energy. There have always been those who 
believed it and defended it, and there have always 
been those who rejected it and assailed it as an 
impediment to faith and a libel on the divine char- 
acter. 

Very early in the history of the church the theo- 
logians began to wrestle with it ; the words of tlie 
Apostle Paul, in the Epistles to the Romans and 
the Ephesians, seemed to affirm the doctrine of pre- 
destination, and the Fathers, in their exposition of 
his writings, were compelled to consider the ques- 
tion how far the predeterminations of the Creator 
affect the characters and the destiny of his crea- 
tures. Most of these earlier Fathers reasonably 
took these statements of Paul merely as strong 



PREDESTINATION 197 

affirmations of the doctrine of divine providence. 
The Greek teachers generally insist upon the free- 
dom of the human will as the foundation of virtue, 
and make that the foundation of theology. It is 
the simple truth that during the first three centu- 
ries the notion that the destiny of all men is fixed 
before the creation by a divine decree scarcely 
found place in the teachings of the church. Calvin 
himself acknowledges this ; he can only explain 
it by the assumption that the minds of these early 
Fathers were not properly illuminated. 

It was not until the beginning of the fifth cen- 
tury that Augustine, the great Latin theologian, 
gave to the doctrine of predestination its dogmatic 
form. The doctrine was of course organically 
connected with the doctrine of original sin, — the 
doctrine that the whole human race sinned in 
Adam, and are guilty and punishable with him, 
having no power to repent, and being doomed, 
unless God shall intervene, to endless misery. 
Augustine shrank from saying, what some in later 
years were bold to say, that God decreed the sin of 
Adam ; he only said that God permitted it. But 
the notion that God had bound Adam and all his 
posterity together indissolubly, so that the guilt of 
the ancestor is inherited and shared by all his de- 
scendants, he does teach in the most unequivocal 
manner. If Adam was not predestined to sin, all 
his posterity were predestined to be partakers of 
the guilt of his sin, and of the moral weakness 
and inability to all good which it entailed. Out of 



198 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

this mass of depravity, God determined, from all 
eternity, that He would save some. " Before the 
foundation of the world," Augustine sa} s, " God 
chose us in Christ, predestinating us to the adop- 
tion of sons ; not because He saw that we icould be 
pure and sinless, but that we might be. Moreover, 
He did this according to the pleasure of his will, 
that no man might glory in his own will, but rather 
in God's will." ^ The number of the elect, he says, 
is fixed and certain, so that it can neither be in- 
creased nor diminished by anything that man can 
do. These are Augustine's words ; Hagenbach 
summarizes his teaching thus : " God, in conse- 
quence of an eternal decree, and without any refer- 
ence to the future conduct of man, has elected 
some out of the corrupt mass to become vessels 
of his mercy (vasa misericord ice^, and left the 
rest, as vessels of his wrath (vasa irce)^ to a just 
condemnation. Augustine called the former ^^re- 
destiiiatio^ the latter rcprohatio.'''' ^ 

The doctrine of Augustine was sharply attacked 
by Pelagius, who asserted the freedom of the will 
and denied the imputation of Adam's sin to his 
posterity. But Pelagius went as far astray in that 
direction as Augustine had gone in the other ; for 
he practically denied the facts of heredity, and so 
understated the need of divine help in overcoming 
sin as to make man practicall}^ independent of his 
Maker. With all its exaggerations, Augustine's 

1 De Fred. Sanctorum, 37 (C. 18). 

2 Hist, of Doctrine, § 113. 



PKEDESTINATION 199 

theory came nearer to the facts of human experi- 
ence than did that of Pelagius ; and if either of 
the two theories must prevail, it was better that 
that of Augustine should have the ascendency. 
His view it was, in the main, which was carried 
over by the Western church. There was much 
dissent, and there were many controversies, but the 
Augustinian theology remained the standard of 
Orthodoxy until the time of the Reformation. 

Luther was not always logical, and he often 
gives utterance to in.consistent views. Indeed, we 
might say of him, as of many others, that his in- 
consistencies are often the best part of his teaching. 
But he was, nevertheless, a strenuous predestina- 
tionist ; no one has ever more vehemently asserted 
the absolute despotism of the divine will. " In his 
battle with Erasmus," says Professor Fisher, " Lu- 
ther affirmed in almost reckless language the im- 
potence of the human will. God's agency was 
asserted to be the universal cause. His will was 
declared to be subject to no law, but to be the 
foundation of right. Predestination was declared 
to be unconditional, and to include as its objects 
the lost as well as the saved. ' By this thunder- 
bolt,' he said, ' free will is laid low and utterly 
crushed.' " ^ 

Calvin is not less positive ; indeed, he is much 
more consistently rigid in his enforcement of the 
dogma. " According to Calvin," says Professor 
Fisher, " God has determined by an eternal decree 

1 Hist, of Christian Doctrine, p. 292. 



200 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

' what He would have to become of every individ- 
ual of mankind.' Eternal life is foreordained for 
some, and eternal damnation for others. 'Every- 
one is created for one or the other of these ends.' 
God has once for all determined ' whom He would 
admit to salvation and whom He would condemn 
to destruction.' Prescience does not explain the 
hardening of heart which includes an intervention 
of God, beyond mere foreknowledge. It takes 
place first by the withdrawal of God's spirit, and 
secondly by the employment of Satan, the minister 
of his wrath, to influence their mind and their ef- 
forts. To inquire into the reasons of the divine 
will is idle ; for ' there is nothing gTcater or higher 
than the will of God.' It ' is the cause of every- 
thing that exists.' " ^ 

Edwards also affirmed this doctrine with the 
strongest emphasis. He held that the sovereignty 
of God is absolute, that every choice of man is de- 
creed by God. God is the only cause. Everything 
that is done is done by Him. 

The doctrine of predestination known to the 
modern church receives its clearest expression in 
the great "Westminster Assembly's Confession and 
catechisms, which are still the standards of doctrine 
of the Presbyterian Church. The same Confession 
was adopted by assemblies of the Congregation - 
alists of England and of the United States; and 
while Congregationalism does not admit any au- 
thoritative creed as binding on all the churches, 

^ Hist, of Christian Doctrine, p. 300. 



PREDESTINATION 201 

this one was recognized, until a recent date, by 
most Congregationalists as expressing the sub- 
stance of Christian doctrine. One hundred years 
ago it would have been hard to find a Congrega- 
tional minister who would have dissented from the 
teaching of his creed respecting predestination ; 
even in my boyhood there were few who did not 
heartily believe it. 

This Confession begins by asserting that God 
from all eternity, " by the most wise and holy coun- 
sel of his own wiU, did freely and unchangeably 
ordain whatsoever comes to pass ; yet so as thereby 
neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence 
offered to the will of the creature, nor is the liberty 
or contingency of second causes taken away, but 
rather established." ^ If this seems like a contra- 
diction in terms, we must not too sharply censure 
it, for doubtless the subject is one respecting 
which it is not easy to preserve logical consistency. 
The inconsistencies of this Confession are the best 
part of it. Unfortunately, when the theologians 
went on to define exactly what this doctrine means 
they used language which makes all these asser- 
tions of freedom utterly meaningless and even pre- 
posterous. For example : — 

" By the decree of God, for the manifestation of 
bis glory, some men and angels are predestinated 
unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to 
everlasting death. 

" These angels and men, thus predestinated and 

1 Chap. iii. 



202 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

foreordained, are particularly and unchangeably 
designed ; and their number is so certain and defi- 
nite that it cannot be either increased or dimin- 
ished." 1 

The next article strenuously denies that this 
election was based on any foresight of good in those 
thus chosen ; it was a perfectly arbitrary decree. 

Such is, for substance, the doctrine of predesti- 
nation as it has been held and taught in the Chris- 
tian church for fifteen centuries. Two or three 
implications of the doctrine deserve our considera- 
tion. 

The first is the fate of the non-elect infants. For 
predestinism, in the days of its vigor, never stam- 
mered in its assertion of the fact that among those 
passed by and left to perish were multitudes of in- 
fants. This is logicall}^ involved in the doctrine. 
The belief that all infants dying, in infancy are 
saved can no more be reconciled with this doctrine 
of unconditional predestination than light can be 
reconciled with darkness. It is true that those who 
now profess to believe in the doctrine of election do 
almost all believe that infants dying in infancy are 
saved ; but they trample all their logic under foot 
when they thus make room for the children. And 
this relenting of the old theology is but recent. I 
have heard Presbyterian ministers and Congrega- 
tional ministers deny that anybody ever believed in 
the damnation of any infants : but one must blush 
for the ignorance of the theologian who makes such 
1 Chap. iii. 



PREDESTINATION 203 

a statement. How obstinately he must have shut 
his eyes to the facts that blaze upon the pages of 
the history of doctrine ! Augustine clearly taught 
that some infants were sent to perdition ; he lays it 
down as a postulate in one of his arguments ; it 
does not need to be proved, it can be assumed as 
undoubted. Calvin taught it in the most unmis- 
takable terms, over and over. "I ask again," he 
says, " how it is that the fall of Adam involves so 
many nations with their infant children in eternal 
death without remedy, unless that so it seemed 
meet to God." iVll the heathen, and all their in- 
fant children, were consigned by the decrees of God 
to perdition. This was one of the foundation stones 
of the Calvinistic doctrine. 

Not long after Calvin's day there was a revolt in 
the Low Countries against the Calvinistic doctrine, 
led by Jacob Arminius ; the Remonstrants, as they 
were called, were the founders of that theological 
school which has been most vigorously represented 
by Wesley and the Methodists. It was they who 
began to deny this doctrine of unconditional pre- 
destination, and along with it the doctrine of in- 
fant damnation. To check this revolt, the Synod 
of Dort was called in 1618 ; and the predestination- 
ists of all the European countries came together to 
agree upon a manifesto by which their doctrine 
should be cleared and confirmed. Much was said 
in that synod about the infants ; and while it was 
agreed that many infants are saved, either by the 
divine decree, ov by their covenant relation with 



201 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

godly parents, I cannot find that any theologian 
of that synod expressed his belief in the salvation 
of all infants. 

Zwingli, the great Swiss reformer, had before 
this day avowed that faith ; but Zwingli was some- 
thing of a heretic ; his hopes for the little children 
were not shared by many of his brethren. 

The Westminster Assembly's Confession deals 
with the subject in a manner inferential, but un- 
mistakable. " Elect infants," it affirms, " dying in 
infancy are regenerated and saved by the operation 
of the Spirit." The implication is that there are 
non-elect infants who die in infancy and who are 
not saved. Many attempts have been made to ex- 
plain away this language, but no man who does not 
wish to proclaim his ignorance should engage in 
such an enterprise. If you want to know what 
those divines thought about this subject read their 
writings. They have put themselves on record in 
many treatises and sermons, in which they unfalter- 
ingly deny that all infants will be saved. Indeed, 
it was a cardinal point of doctrine with every one 
of them that all the infants of the heathen dying 
in infancy went to eternal perdition. William 
Twisse, the prolocutor or president of the Assem- 
bly, says : " Many thousands, even all the infants 
of Turkes and Sarazens dying in original sin are 
tormented in hell fire." Many others of the lead- 
ers of the Assembly, even of the committee which 
reported this article, are equally explicit. Profes- 
sor Briggs says: "We are able to say that the 



PREDESTINATION 205 

Westminster divines were unanimous on this ques- 
tion of the salvation of elect mfants only. We 
have examined the greater part of the writings of 
the Westminster divines, and have not been able 
to find any different opinion from the extracts we 
have given. The Presbyterian churches have de- 
parted from their standards on this question, and it 
is simple honesty to acknowledge it. We are at 
liberty to amend the Confession, but we have no 
right to distort it and to pervert its grammatical 
and historical meaning." ^ 

It is rather curious, I think, that any one who 
professes to believe in the doctrine of unconditional 
predestination as applied to adults should hesitate 
to believe in the damnation of infants. For it is 
the very substance of the doctrine that every adult 
individual of the non-elect was a damned infant 
the moment he drew his first breath. He came 
into the world with this curse upon him. He was 
one of that fixed number of the reprobate which 
can neither be increased nor diminished by any- 
thing that men or angels can do. It was never for 
one moment possible for him to escape from the 
doom which had been determined for him from all 
eternity. The most merciful thing that coidd pos- 
sibly happen to him, therefore, would be to send 
him straight to hell from his mother's arms. For 
it is by all these theologians admitted that the sin- 
ner waxes worse the older he grows, and that the 
more he sins the heavier will be his penalty. If 
1 Whither? p. 134. 



206 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

this infant lives to maturity or old age, he will 
only heap up wrath against the day of wrath ; the 
sooner he is removed from the earth the lighter will 
be the weight of his everlasting torment. The 
non-elect who are sent to hell in their infancy are 
the most mercifully treated of all the non-elect. 

The certain perdition of all the heathen is also, 
as several of these citations have shown, a distinct 
corollary of this doctrine of predestination as it 
has been preached and believed in past centuries. 
The AYestminster Confession most emphatically 
denies that " men not professing the Christian reli- 
gion can be saved in an}^ other way whatsoever, be 
they never so diligent to frame their lives accord- 
ing to the light of nature, and the law of that reli- 
gion they do profess ; " and it passionately declares 
that " to assert and maintain that they may is very 
pernicious and to be detested." 

Let us see, now, if we can fairly and calmly 
state this doctrine of unconditional election and 
reprobation, which has been taught by so many 
of the great theologians ; which has been believed 
by hundreds of millions of devout men, by some of 
the greatest and best men that have lived in the 
world, and which stands to-day uncontradicted and 
unqualified in the creeds of some of the great reli- 
gious denominations. 

1. In the counsels of eternity God determined 
to create man and subject him to temptation under 
which it was probable that he would fall. Some 
of the theologians say that God decreed the sin ; 



PREDESTINATION 207 

others shrink from this and declare that the decree 
is concerned with what followed the fall, not with 
what preceded it. 

2. It is certain, however, that such a relation 
was established between our first parent and his 
offspring that if he should fall, the moral taint of 
his sin and the guilt of it would be transmitted 
to all his progeny; so that every one of them 
would come into life " utterly indisposed, disabled, 
and made opposite to all good and wholly inclined 
to all evil," — so that from the hour of his birth 
every human being would be helpless to save him- 
self, and would be " bound over to the wrath of 
God and curse of the law and so made subject to 
death, with all miseries, spiritual, temporal, and 
eternal." 

3. From eternity, before the worlds were created, 
God determined that he would select from this 
weltering mass of moral inability and misery a cer- 
tain fixed and definite number whom he would 
save. To this number, from the moment when the 
decree was formed, not one name could be added, 
and from it not one could be subtracted. The 
exact population of heaven and of hell was fixed 
long before the foundation of the world. 

4. Those thus chosen were selected by a purely 
arbitrary choice, a choice w4iich had absolutely 
nothing to do with their prospective merit or 
demerit. 

5. Those not thus chosen were, from all eternity, 
foredoomed to eternal misery. " The rest of man- 



208 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

kind," says the Confession, " God was pleased, ac- 
cording to the unsearchable counsel of his own will, 
whereby He extendeth or withholdeth mercy as He 
pleaseth, for the glory of his sovereign power over 
his creatures, to pass hj^ and to ordain them to 
dishonor and wrath for their sin, to the praise of 
his glorious justice." 

6. Just what proportion of the race is elected 
and saved, and what proportion is reprobated and 
consigned to eternal torment, we do not know ; but 
the great Confession tells us plainly that all the 
heathen and all their offspring are lost, and these, 
up to the present day, constitute an overwhelming 
majority of the race. If what the Larger Catechism 
tells us is true, that " they who, having never heard 
the gospel, know not Jesus Christ and believe not 
in him cannot be saved, be they never so diligent to 
frame their lives according to the light of nature 
or the law of that religion they profess," there 
must be hundreds of billions of souls in hell to- 
day. And the population of that place must be 
growing, pretty rapidly. Something like fifteen 
hundred millions of human beings are living on 
this planet ; of these perhaps fifty millions die 
every year; not one fourth of them have heard 
the gospel or know of Jesus Christ ; from thirty 
to forty millions every year must, if this doctrine 
is true, go down to that pit. What a population 
must swarm to-day in that vast land of eternal 
night! For history, as we are forced to read it 
to-day, carries back the period during which our 



PREDESTINATION 209 

race has inhabited the planet far beyond the six 
thousand years of the old conjectural chronology ; 
one hundred thousand years, some of the thinkers 
say, is a more probable term. " The countless 
silent centuries that lie behind recorded history," 
says Dr. Gordon, " are to-day one of the most 
touching, fascinating, and bewildering objects of 
thought. They have at last risen from their long 
sleep, they have finally found recognition." ^ Of 
course all these, if we are to accept the implicit 
and unqualified statements of these old confessions, 
have been consigned to hopeless and endless mis- 
ery. Well may we cry with Whittier : — 

*' O the generations old 
Over whom no church-bells tolled ; 
Christless, lifting up blind eyes 
To the silence of the skies ! 
For the innumerable dead 
Is my soul disquieted. 

" Where be now those silent hosts ? 
Where the camping ground of ghosts ? 
Where the spectral conscripts led 
To the white tents of the dead ? 
What strange shore or chartless sea, 
Holds the awful mystery ? " 

Finally, we are told that all this is done by the 
Creator, to illustrate his " glorious justice " which 
men are bound to praise. These uncounted bil- 
lions of the non-elect now in eternal torment were 
brought into being by Him; they had no option 
about being born ; it was his creative fiat that gave 
1 The Christ of To-Bay, p. 13. 



210 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

them life. They came into being under a constitu- 
tion which He had foreordained, and by means of 
which every one of them from the moment of his 
birth was foredoomed to a life of sin in this world 
and an eternity of misery. It was not for any- 
thing that they had done that they were born sin- 
ners, and found themselves in helpless bondage to 
a bad heredity ; it was not for anything that they 
had done or failed to do that they were passed by 
and left to perish in that misery ; but it is all done 
to the praise of his glorious justice ! 

And this is the Being who by many devout men 
has been called God, and worshiped ! 

Is this doctrine of unconditional election and re- 
probation believed to-day ? I do not think that it 
is believed by fairly educated Christian men of 
any denomination. It would be difficult to find 
any Protestant who would confess his belief that 
any infant, whether of heathen or Christian parent- 
age, is sent to endless punishment on account of 
Adam's sin ; and the men are growing scarce who 
will admit the truth of the doctrine that no hea- 
then who has not heard of Christ can possibly be 
saved. The salvation of all infants dying in in- 
fancy is almost universally believed by Protestant 
Christians. But that admission pulverizes the pre- 
destinarian logic. For if the unconditional damna- 
tion of non-elect infants is unjust, the uncondi- 
tional damnation of non-elect adults is, as I have 
already shown, ten times more unjust. And there- 
fore this system of thought has not and cannot 



PREDESTINATION 211 

have any real hold upon the thought of the race. 
The moral sense of mankind is in rebellion against 
it. The churches which retain it in their confes- 
sions have simply moved away from it. The kind 
of Calvinism which is held and taught by most 
Presbyterian ministers to-day is no more the Cal- 
vinism of Calvin than the astronomy which is 
taught in our colleges to-day is the astronomy of 
Ptolemy. It is based on the righteousness or the 
love of God and not upon his sovereignty. The 
central idea of Angustinianism and Calvinism as 
philosophies of the universe is force. The central 
idea of all the theology that is taught to-day is 
righteousness. The fundamental explanation of 
everything under this predestinarian conception 
was God's will. The fundamental explanation 
now is God's character. The old theology was un- 
moral. The new theology — and by the new the- 
ology I mean that which is preached not only in 
Congregational pulpits, but in Presbyterian pulpits 
and Baptist pulpits, — in all the pulpits from which 
Calvinism was once preached — is substantially a 
moral theology. 

Let me give you a few sentences from a recent 
book of Dr. Henry Van Dyke of New York. Dr. 
Van Dyke is the son of a man who was a leader of 
the Old School wing of the Presbyterian Church ; he 
is himself a graduate of Princeton and a Doctor of 
Divinity by decoration of that ancient stronghold 
of orthodoxy ; he was lately the pastor of one of 
the most conservative Old School Presbyterian 



212 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

churches in New York city. Listen to him and 
see whether he believes in the Calvinism of Calvin : 

" The Bible never says that faith is a gift. 
There is a voluntary element in it. It is some- 
thing to he done by the exercise of an inward 
power. It is a coming of the soul to Christ ; it is 
a following of the soul after him ; it is the first 
step in a long course of spiritual activity. . . . 
Now there is not a hint in all the teaching of Jesus 
that this first act of freedom is impossible for 
any soul to whom he speaks. He has no idea of 
an eternal predestination binding some to belief 
and others to unbelief, a secret decree including 
certain men in the kingdom and excluding others 
from it." 

" I do not believe that there is a single passage 
in the Old Testament which contradicts Christ's 
doctrine of the real liberty of the soul. But if 
there were such a passage I would leave it forever 
alone as belonging to that knowledge w^iich was in 
part, and which was done away when that which 
was perfect had come." 

" If there is any validity whatever in our moral 
instincts, we need not hesitate to say that from 
our present point of view, which is for us the only 
one attainable, this theory of the absolute and un- 
conditional sovereignty of God exercised by one 
law of necessity over all creatures is so far from 
being for God's glory that it is apparently for his 
shame and dishonor. As a matter of fact it has 
been, and still is, the most fertile mother of doubts. 



PKEDESTINATION 213 

. . . The idea of an irresponsible God ruling by 
an eternal and inflexible ^a^ over responsible men 
is a moral nightmare, under which humanity 
groans, and from which it struggles to awake, even 
though it should have to open its eyes upon the 
blank darkness of an unsearchable night. Be- 
tween the unknowable God of agnosticism and the 
unlovable God of absolutism there is indeed little 
to choose. But the choice, such as it is, lies on the 
side of agnosticism. It is unspeakably better to 
doubt God's personality, his supremacy, his very 
being, than it is to doubt his eternal goodness and 
his moral integrity." ^ 

That is the kind of doctrine which is heard to- 
day in the strong, leading Presbyterian pulpits of 
this country, — and even stronger and braver teach- 
ing than this is heard in most of the Presbyterian 
pulpits of Scotland. How much is left in it of the 
old doctrine of unconditional predestination I will 
let you tell. 

The whole grim, ghastly, appalling fabrication is 
built upon a deification of will. The central ele- 
ment of personality, men said, is the will. God's 
will must, then, be the foundation of theology. 
Take the principle of will, make it omnipotent and 
absolute, subordinate to it every other element of 
character, then deduce your theology from that 
principle, and you will have the Augustinian Cal- 
vinism. 

The craving for a simplification of religious 

1 The Gospel for an Age of Doubt, p. 263. 



214 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

theory — the search for a single principle by which 
everything can be explained — contributed to the 
supremacy^ of this doctrine. It does wonderfully 
simplify the confusions of life to make a single 
force, like the will of God, account for everything. 
But simplicity is sometimes sought at too great a 
cost ; we attain unto it by ignoring about half the 
phenomena with which we have to deal. 

Indeed, I think that the last word of philosophy 
threatens to put this determinism out of court. 
For it is the scientific people who have lately been 
preaching predestination most diligently. There 
is a stiff sort of materialistic philosophy which is 
just as fatalistic as Augustine or Calvin ever was. 
" It professes," says William James, " that those 
parts of the universe already laid down absolutely 
appoint and decree what the other parts shall be. 
The future has no ambiguous possibilities hid in 
its womb ; the part we call the present is compati- 
ble with only one totality. Any other future com- 
plement than the one fixed from eternity is impos- 
sible. The whole is in each and every part, and 
welds it with the rest into an absolute unity, an 
iron block, in which there can be no equivocation 
or shadow of turning. 

" ' With earth's first clay, they did the last man knead, 
And there of the last harvest sowed the seed, 
And the first morning' of creation wrote 
What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.' " ^ 

To the philosophic reply to this fatalism I can give 

1 The Will to Believe, p. 150. 



PREDESTINATION 215 

no space in this chapter ; let it suffice to say that 
the answer given by Professor James in the volume 
just quoted seems to me adequate. 

With most of us the testimony of consciousness 
is probably sufficient. None of us can have any 
clearer evidence than that of our own conscious- 
ness, and there is none of us who is not every 
hour conscious of freedom, — absolutely sure that 
he has the power to do many things which he 
leaves undone, and to leave undone that which 
he is doing. The world is full of possibilities 
with which our choices connect themselves ; we 
know that many paiths open before us every day, 
and that there is vast difference between what we 
are and what we might have been. The modern 
scientific determinism, like the old religious pre- 
destinism. is the creation of a stark logic which 
ignores fully half of the facts of life. The most 
distinguished of living English scientists recently 
spoke of " the demonstrated daily miracle of our 
human free will," as one of the undoubted facts 
which science could not explain but must assume. 

It must, however, be said that this grim doctrine 
has done some good work in the world. There was 
never a hurricane or a flood which did not bring 
some blessings to mankind. Systems, like men, 
have what the French call the defects of their 
qualities : the best systems have their injurious 
influences, and the worst ones have beneficent in- 
fluences. 

It cannot be denied that Calvinism has strength- 



216 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRIXES? 

ened the defenses of civil liberty. It has always 
been the enemy of absolutism in the state. It 
always stands up for the indiN-idual against hierar- 
chies and tyi^annies. '* This man is in the hands 
of God,"' it says : " let him alone I AYho art 
thou that jndgest another man's servant ? To his 
owD master he standeth or falleth.'* In fact, Cal- 
vinism made God such a tremendous tyrant that it 
was simply compelled to deny and resist all earthly 
tyrannies. And this has been, historically, a mat- 
ter of immense consequence to the civilization of 
Eui'ope and America. 

Doubtless, also, in the development of the in- 
dividual character, it has often wrought out the 
beautiful results of humility and trust in the divine 
ix)wer. This could not have been gained without 
emphasizing other attributes of God than that 
which Calvinism makes central : but the sense of 
dependence on God which it cultivates is a source 
of strength to all who fully experience it. 

Take the case of Augustine. His theology really 
sprung from his exj^erience. When his logic got 
to work upon it. it made a horrible idol out of it ; 
but in its origin it was human and reasonable. It 
was his deep exjierience of his own weakness and 
sinfidness and need that led bim to exalt the di- 
vine efficiency. His philosophy is only a logical 
overstatement, which amounts to a caricature, of 
a profound fact. But the fact is there — the human 
need, the divine bounty. Grace is not what Au- 
gustine figiu'ed it, — a vast, all-compelling euergy, 



PREDESTINATION 217 

which overbears and submerges and sweeps away 
the human personality in its resistless onset ; it is 
rather the helper of our infirmities, the prompter 
of our better thoughts, the quickening influence 
that reinforces all that is best in us and makes iis 
strong to achieve and overcome. We are saved by 
grace, and grace is help. The greatest fact in the 
creation of God is a fact of which this old philoso- 
phy never gained any adequate conception, — it is 
the creation of a free human personality. By the 
side of that, all the wonders of astronomy and phy- 
sics sink into insignificance. Explain it we cannot, 
but here is the fact. The one wonderful thing, as 
Tennyson says, is, — 

" Not matter, nor the finite-infinite, 
But this main miracle that thou art thou, 
With power on thine own act and on the world." 

Having endowed man with freedom, God respects 
the work of his hands — let me rather say the off- 
spring of his love ; and force is forever laid aside 
in appeals to this personality. The claims of rea- 
son, the impulses of affection, the dictates of right- 
eousness, are the only powers that can rightly con- 
trol his action. He is made for virtue, and there 
is no virtue where there is constraint. The kind 
of compulsion which the irresistible grace of the 
old theology assumed is a moral absurdity. Grace 
is help ; and every human soul needs help, and 
must have it ; there is no salvation without it. 
That is the real truth for which the Old Calvinism 
stood, the truth which it distorted, by its exaggera- 



218 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

tions, until it made of God not an almighty Helper, 
but an almighty Tyrant. God's sovereignty is not 
the sovereignty of force, of will ; it is the sover- 
eignty of reason, of affection. " His sovereignty," 
says Dr. Van Dyke, " embraces human liberty as 
the ocean surrounds an island. His sovereignty 
upholds human liberty as the air upholds a flying 
bird. His sovereignty defends human liberty as 
the authority of a true king defends the liberty of 
his subjects, — nay, rather as the authority of a 
father tenderly and patiently respects and protects 
the spiritual freedom of his children, in order that 
they may learn to love and obey him gladly and of 
their own accord. For this is the end of God's 
sovereignty : that his kingdom may come ; that 
his will may be done on earth, — not as it is done 
in the circling of the stars or in the blossoming of 
flowers, but as it is done in heaven, where created 
spirits freely strike the notes that blend in perfect 
harmony with the music of the divine spirit." ^ 
1 The Gospel for an Age of Doubt, p. 271. 



XI 

CONVERSION 

The fact of degeneration is not disputed. That 
a man may change from good to bad and from bad 
to worse is universally admitted, and volumes are 
filled with scientific reports upon this process of 
deterioration. To most persons this is all that 
heredity means ; it connotes the transmission of 
evil traits and tendencies and their downward pull 
upon the lives by which they are inherited. That 
easy grade to Avernus has been well surveyed ; we 
know every furlong of it. The popular theology, 
with its doctrine of total depravity, has accustomed 
us, in our study of man, to look for evil and only 
evil, and that continually ; we expect to see him 
sinking deeper and deeper into vice and moral 
helplessness. And science, in its study of morbid 
conditions, has put a great deal of emphasis on the 
same tendencies. "Degeneration," says Professor 
Harris, " is a stock word of evolution. There is, 
then, no occasion for surprise, if reversion and 
degeneration appear in the development of the 
human species. Their absence would be surpris- 
ing. There is human as well as plant and animal 
degeneracy. Max Nordau borrowed the title of 



220 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

his book from evolution. As plants and animals 
have diseases which are abnormal, and which im- 
pair or destroy the normal type, so there is moral 
disease which invades and corrupts the ideal char- 
acter. Wiiethcr avoidable or not is a question 
that pertains to personality. Whether actual or 
not is a question which does not even arise." ^ 

What is the nature of this moral degeneration 
which all of us have witnessed, which some of us, 
no doubt, have experienced ? Is it an unconscious 
change ? Is the man wholly passive in the pro- 
cess ? If you expose the human body to a malari- 
ous climate, it becomes gradually tainted by this 
malarious influence ; its organs are impaired, its 
vigor is reduced, its functions are diseased. But, 
in all this, the body is unconscious and passive ; it 
suffers this injury without contributing to it ; the 
influence is insidious, but it is an external influ- 
ence ; the physical degeneration is wrought upon 
the body by a force acting from without. Is it 
the same with the character ? Can that be changed 
for the worse unconsciously and without a strug- 
gle? I do not think so. I am aware that bad 
moral influences are very insidious, about as subtle 
as the malaria itself, and that a man who is sur- 
rounded with selfishness and impurity and mean- 
ness is often very insensibly led along the down- 
ward way by the pressure of the environing evil ; 
and 3^et I do not think that it is quite possible for 
any man to deteriorate without knowing it, without 

^ Moral Evolution, p. 274. 



CONVERSION 221 

having a hand in it. For every human being has 
some sort of ideal. That makes him a man. He 
is not merely a thing, pushed along in his devel- 
opment by forces acting upon him ; he is a per- 
son ; he is a power ; and always there is lifted uj) 
before him some concej^tion of the man he ought 
to be. There is no sane human being who does 
not see such a vision beckoning him, and who does 
not feel that he ought to follow it. The concep- 
tion of what manhood means may be very crude 
and defective, but it is there in his mind, and it 
lays its authority upon him. He cannot help judg- 
ing himself, all the while, by this standard. When= 
ever he takes a bad step downward he knows that 
he is departing from his ideal ; he knows that he 
is unfaithful to the light which he has ; he knows 
that that which is lower is getting the mastery in 
him over that which is higher. His Dr. Jekyll is 
losing and his Mr. Hyde is gaining control. With 
Paul he says, " The good which I would that I do 
not, but the evil which I would not that I practice." 
With the old Eomans he cries, "Video meliora 
proboque, deteriora sequor." All literature, all lan- 
guage, is full of the records of this struggle of the 
sinking soul which is worsted by the bad environ- 
ment and the bad inheritance and driven further 
and further away from its own ideal. The point 
to be noted is that it is more or less of a struggle ; 
that there is always some sense of defeat, and of 
blame and shame on account of it. The man does 
not blame himself for the evil influences that^sur- 



222 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

round him, and lie need not blame himself for any 
bad heredity, but he does blame himself for not hav- 
ing more sturdily resisted these malign influences. 
It is not wholly a matter of pressure upon him, and 
he knows it. His own choices or failures to 
choose ; his own surrenders to the evil when he 
might have fought, and if worst were, died fighting 
— these are elements in the process which he can- 
not hide from himself. He has contributed to his 
own downfall. He has been unfaithful to his own 
ideals. Doubtless the ideals have been dimmed 
and lowered by this very infidelity, so that they do 
not command him now as once they did, but there 
is still and always a disparity between what he 
knows he ought to be and what he is. All this is 
involved in every instance of the deterioration of 
character. It is something more than a biological 
or organic degeneration. It is a spiritual degen- 
eration. There is something behind all these in- 
stincts and impulses and appetites and tendencies 
which judges them all by a standard of its own and 
says, " I ought ; I have sinned ; I am to blame." 
That something is weakened and degraded in this 
process of moral degeneration. 

Degeneration is a fact. Nobody denies it. It 
is one of the most firmly established facts in the 
history of the race. 

But how about regeneration ? Is that an impos- 
sibility ? Is it true that a man may change from 
good to bad and from bad to worse, but that he 
cannot change from bad to good and from good to 



C0X\T:RSI0N 223 

better ? Is there no sncli thing as stopping in the 
downward career, and struggling upward to purer 
air and better footing ? There are many, in these 
days, who seem to answer this question very posi- 
tively in the negative. They are inclined to deny 
that there can be any such change of character as 
that which is described under the terms conversion 
and regeneration. Dr. James Freeman Clarke, 
one of the most emineot of the Unitarian minis- 
ters, says : "'It is quite common, among Liberal 
Christians, to doubt the reality or deny the impor= 
tance of such changes altogetlier. T\'ith them the 
Christian life consists, not in change, but in pro° 
gress. In the Christian course. Orthodoxy lays the 
chief stress on the commencement ; Liberal Chris- 
tianity on the progress. The one wishes you to 
begin the journey without seeming to care whether 
you go forward ; the other urges you to go for- 
ward, without inquiring whether you have begun 
to o'O.'" ^ It ouo-ht to be understood that Dr. Clarke 
thinks both these answers imperfect, but what we 
are now concerned with is his testimony that there 
are mam^ of those with whom he is associated who 
" doubt the reality or deny the importance " of the 
change known as conversion or regeneration. Such 
doubts and denials are very common in circles still 
further removed from the sympathies and activities 
of the church. 

Xor can we wonder that skepticism has arisen 
respecting the reality of such changes. Those who 

1 Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, p. 175. 



224 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

watch the conduct of the multitudes who are an- 
nually reported as having* passed through these 
changes, in connection with the churches, may well 
indulge this doubt. For it is a melancholy fact 
that out of the thousands who every winter are 
counted as converts, the great majority appear to 
fall back very soon into their old ways. No very 
clear change in their motives, tempers, purposes, 
seems to have taken place. The experience appears 
to have had more to do with their emotions than 
with their principles of action or their habits of 
life. And it must be owned that, in the teaching 
and administration of all the churches, much more 
emphasis has generally been put upon certain emo- 
tional accompaniments of conversion than upon 
the change of character. In the first twenty-five 
years of my life I passed through a great many 
^revivals ; from my eighth year onward, I was in- 
tensely interested in them : I know as well as any 
human being can know what kinds of experiences 
and effects were emphasized in the preaching and 
the revival methods of at least three different de- 
nominations ; and it is the simple truth that the 
main interest of these meetings was in the emo- 
tional effects produced by them. If a man was 
sorely depressed in his feelings for a season, and if 
that depression gave way to a feeling of exhilara- 
tion or elation, it was deemed a clear case of con- 
version. The whole machinery of the revival was 
managed with a view to producing these two states 
of feeling. The success of the revival largely de- 



CONVERSION 225 

pended on the power of the revivalist to play upon 
the feelings of his hearers. 

Now I am far from wishing that religion should 
be divorced from emotion, or from denying that 
even such methods as these do often result in deep 
and lasting changes of character ; but I say that 
the tendency of much of what has been known as 
revivalism has been to exalt the emotional elements 
of the change unduly, and quite to neglect the 
proper direction of the intellect, the conscience, 
and the will ; and therefore a large proportion of 
those swept into the churches on these tides of feel- 
ing are like the seed sown in the rocky places 
which has no deepness of earth to root in, and 
which, when the sun is up, withers away. Our 
towns and cities are full of these people. Of 
the adult Protestants in America, who are now 
wholly outside of all church influences, I dare say 
that it would be found, if the facts were known, 
that a very large majority have been through such 
an experience as this, in connection with some re- 
vival. Many of them are now incorrigible skep- 
tics concerning this change which men call conver- 
sion. They will tell you that they have been 
through it themselves, and they know that there is 
nothing in it. 

All such facts, and it must be owned that there 
are too many of them, furnish basis for the doubt 
and denial with which we are dealing. They do 
undoubtedly justify us in admitting that there is 
much which goes by the name of conversion and 



226 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

regeneration which is spurious and unreaL But it 
is not easy to prove a negative of the sort we are 
considering. One could easily show that ninety- 
nine hundredths of all the ornaments and objects 
that look like gold are not gold, — that they are 
brass or pinchbeck or gilded ware. But that does 
not prove that there is no such thing as gold ", it 
rather goes to show that there must be such a 
thing and that it is a very precious thing. 

Let us go back to the question. Degeneration, 
we said, is an undoubted fact. Is it, then, credible 
that there can be no such thing as regeneration ? 
Is the downward path the only one open to human 
souls ? Is the universe so ordered that a man may 
freely go toward ruin, but cannot turn from that 
path and set his face toward the perfection of his 
manhood ? That would be the utterance of the 
dismalest kind of pessimism. The fact that man 
can deteriorate is a fact that sometimes calls loud 
for explanation ; but if you should couple with 
that the belief that improvement is impossible, that 
there is no turning back from the downward road, 
the stars would be blotted from the sky. No 
right-minded man would want to live in such a 
world as that. 

The first reason, then, for believing that it is 
possible for men to turn from the ways of death to 
the ways of life is found in our faith that there is 
a God and that He is good. This is the starting- 
point of all our thinking, and it is the one truth, as 
we saw in our first lecture, which rests on the firm- 



CONVERSION 227 

est foundations. If there is a God who knows and 
loves ns, the ways of life must be open to our feet 
as well as the ways of death. 

The second reason for believing it is that all lit- 
erature and all language assume the possibility of 
such a change in the direction of human conduct. 
The Bible, which, whatever else may be said about 
it, is by all reasonable men admitted to be the su- 
preme manual of human conduct, asserts or implies 
on every page that men may cease to do evil and 
learn to do well. There is no great epic in the 
world's literature which does not rest on this as- 
sumption. The common speech of men always and 
everywhere bears witness to it. 

The third reason for believing it is that we have 
seen the thing taking place. We have seen men, 
under the influence of the highest motives, with 
the expression of trust in God and prayer to Him, 
turning from evil courses and beginning lives of 
faith and virtue. Some of us have the record of 
scores and hundreds of such cases ; we have seen 
the better life, thus consciously begun, go on with- 
out interruption till the day of death. 

The fourth reason for believing it is the witness 
of consciousness. We know that we have the 
power to choose the better life and to struggle 
toward it. Even if we are crippled by heredity 
and borne down by a hostile environment, we can 
turn our faces upstream and swim against the cur- 
rent. The voice that bids us cast away our trans- 
gressions and make ourselves a new heart and a 



228 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

new spirit, to turn ourselves and live, is a voice 
that speaks with authority. Every man knows 
when he hears it that he ought to obey it ; and be- 
cause he ought therefore he can. It is not neces- 
sary to carry the case beyond the court of con- 
science. Every one who reads this, and who knows 
that he is suffering moral degeneration, knows also 
that he ought to stop in that downward career and 
go the other way. 

The change involves the reenthronement of the 
ideal. The resolve which expresses it is simply 
this : *' What I ought to be I will be." Instead 
of weakly surrendering to the baser impulses, the 
man resolves that the law of his mind, — the ideal, 
— and not the law in his members, shall rule his 
life. In fact, it is simply a struggle to regain lost 
manhood and womanhood. Degeneratiou has been 
<roino: on ; the character has fallen awav from the 
manly or womanly type ; the determination is to 
stop this process of waste and destruction, to re- 
cover what has been lost, to rebuild what is falling 
into decay. 

Doubtless, when this becomes a serious purpose, 
the question will soon arise what manner of man 
I ought to be. If the ideal has been dimmed by 
disobedience we desire to have its beauty restored. 
There is no use in aiming at anything below the 
best. The ideal must be perfection. We may 
Dot reach it, but we must aim at nothing below it. 
" Be ye therefore perfect," is the only command 
that is ever heard by the awakened moral nature 



CONVERSION 229 

turning away from the evil. To accept any lower 
standard is to stultify conscience and make failure 
certain. Suppose the draughtsman should say, 
" I will not try to make this straight line perfectly 
straight, or this circle perfectly round ; " suppose 
the builder should say, "I will not try to build 
this wall or this column perfectly perpendicular." 
Doubtless there will be imperfections in all this 
work if the workman do his best ; but perfection 
is the only thing he can try for. It is just so with 
character. The man who knows that he has been 
sinking below himself feels that there is no salva- 
tion for him except as he rises above himself. 
And no man can lift himself by taking hold of 
himself. He must take hold of something above 
him. His own imperfections afford him neither 
pattern nor inspiration. He must lay hold on the 
infinite perfection. 

Thus it is that it becomes the logical, rational, 
natural thing for the man who turns from the 
downward path to turn to God. Any man who 
believes in God must turn to God when he turns 
from sin. In the far country, his first sane thought 
is of his Father's house, and his first right word is, 
" I will arise and go to my Father." For any man 
who believes in God, turning from wrong and turn- 
ing to God are one and the same thing. " For 
any man who believes in God," I say ; but of 
course I mean any man who believes in the God 
that you and I have been taught to believe in. 
There are gods many and lords many ; the God of 



230 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

whom from our childhood we have been taught is 
the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
It is from Him that we have learned what we 
know about God ; it is the conception that He has 
given us which arises in our thought whenever we 
begin to think of that infinite perfection which 
lays its commands upon us. " Be ye therefore 
perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect." 
He is one who loves us all, even the unthankful 
and the evil ; who meets the returning prodigal a 
long way off ; who follows the wanderer into the 
wilderness and brings him home. It is our belief 
that the Infinite Perfection is Infinite Compas- 
sion which makes it possible to repent and return 
from our evil ways. And we have been made to 
believe this by the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the 
scientific, the historical fact, as Professor Harris 
has told us : " Only one answer can be given to 
the question how the belief in God's character was 
created. It came from Jesus ; and it was from the 
life even more than from the words of Jesus. . . . 
All that came to the surface in expression, words 
spoken, deeds done, endurance of indignities, brav- 
ing of ignominious death, — all welled up out of 
his consciousness of God the Father living in him, 
speaking and working through him, shining out in 
the relation of Fatherhood and Sonship. This is 
how the belief in God's Fatherhood came to the 
world. He vitalized it, just by being in the world 
and living out that life of unbroken union with the 
Father. Looking abroad we are confused. Look- 



CONVERSION 231 

ing at him we see God in tlie character of love. 
The Fatherhood of God, with all it involves, with 
the faith and hope it inspires, was given to the 
belief of men in that personality whose life was 
rooted in God and whose teaching, service, suffer- 
ing, and triumph expressed the very character of 
God. As Jesus is in character so God is. All 
this has implications concerning the person of 
Christ which need not now be considered. But 
Jesus did make men believe that God is a good 
and loving Father, who welcomes them, however 
bad they may have been, when they return to 
him with penitence and trust as little children. 
Jesus is the point of connection between men and 
God. The divine life flashes through him, becomes 
visible in his perfect humanity, and thrills into 
the life of men. With one hand he clasps the 
hand of man ; with the other he clasps the hand of 
God, and transmits the life of God to man." ^ 

Mark you, I am not saying that no man ever 
found his way to the Father except through Jesus 
Christ : in every nation devout and penitent souls 
find Him, and trust in Him ; I am only saying that 
for you and me Jesus Christ has been the revealer, 
the mediator. Our conceptions of God have come 
through him. Others, I do not doubt, may have 
seen the glories of the great Salon Carre in the 
Louvre by rushlight, or torchlight, or lamplight ; 
I know that I saw them by sunlight, and I doubt if 
there can be any better light in which to see them. 

1 M(yral Evolution, p. 314. 



232 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

And you and I, whether we know it or not, whether 
we wish it or not, have learned what we know about 
God through Jesus Christ. It is through Him 
that we have been made to believe in the divine 
compassion, and are filled with the hopes of divine 
help and succor when we turn from our evil ways. 

I have used the two words, conversion and re- 
generation, interchangeably, as if they meant the 
same thing. I have done so because in our expe- 
rience there is no possibility of distinguishing them. 
Conversion, if we must make a distinction, signifies 
that part of the cliange which has to do with our 
own conscious purposes and choices. Regeneration 
describes the divine influences which act upon us, 
softening our hearts, awakening our consciences, 
arousing our nobler feelings. When the Prodigal 
sat there musing in the fields, and the thought of 
his home and his father was borne into his heart, 
and he saw how willful and foolish he had been, 
the work of regeneration was going on within him ; 
and when he said, " I wiU arise and go unto my 
father," that was conversion. 

Which of these is first in the order of grace? I 
suppose that regeneration must be, because God is 
first in everything ; He is the Author of all life ; it 
is in Him that we live and move and have our 
being. But in the order of experience there is 
neither first nor last. No man is regenerated till 
his own will has responded to the divine influence ; 
no man can be converted without the aid of the 
divine spirit any more than he can see without 



CONVERSION 233 

light or breathe without air. Which is the first 
condition of fire, fuel or flame ? It is difficult to 
see how there can be fire without somethins^ to 
burn, or how the fuel can burn until the flame or 
the spark is brought to it. Each is conditional for 
the other. 

But the action of this divine Spirit, which re- 
stores our souls, which gently leads us back from 
our wanderings into the ways of life, is silent and 
subtle and manifold in its workings. It is the 
Spirit of life ; and life has just as many ways 
of coming to light, just as many types and forms 
and manifestations in the spiritual world, as in the 
physical world. Some people think that the pro- 
cess of conversion is a stereotyped routine ; that 
there is a mill to go through, and that everybody 
must go in at the hopper and come out at the 
shoot ; that unless you have had the regulation 
experience your conversion is not genuine. There 
are many to whom it is incredible that any man 
should begin to live a new life without going 
through a course at the mourners' bench. Yet 
Jesus says that the influence of the Spirit upon the 
human soul is like the summer wind, whicli " blow- 
eth where it listeth, and thou canst not tell whence 
it Cometh nor whither it goeth," — subtle, myste- 
rious, unobserved in its silent approaches. By a 
thousand different avenues it finds its way into our 
lives. Something makes us serious and thought- 
ful ; the shadow of a divine discontent falls gently 
upon the landscape of our thought ; the unworthi- 



234 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

ness of our aims, the poverty of our gains begin to 
trouble us ; visions of a larger and nobler life pass 
before us, beckoning and calling. Such thoughts 
may come as we muse alone at the eventide, look- 
ing away to the fading light in the western sky 
and to the steadfast stars above us. They may 
come to us as we walk the prowded streets and scan 
the eager faces, and think how many are seeking 
the good of life and how few there be that find it. 
They may come to us in some moment of defeat, 
when we are suddenly made aware of pov/ers wasted 
and ambitions gone astray. They may come to us 
— these heavenly visitants — in the hour of be- 
reavement : — 

" With silence only as their benediction, 
God's ang'els come, 
Where in the shadow of a deep affliction 
The sonl sits dumb." 

But most often, I think, the new desires for better 
life are kindled in us by the touch upon our lives 
of some nature purer and better than our own, 
which reproves us, and charms us, and inspires us 
with new hope. The divine Spirit may reveal the 
Christ to us in many ways, but most of us have , 
seen him first in some good man or woman. The 
life is the light of men — always was, and ever 
shall be. There is regenerating power in holy hu- 
man lives. This is the way God means to convey 
his grace, by living epistles, from parent to child, 
from teacher to pupil, from lover to lover, from 
friend to friend. There is a subtle energy in high 



CONVERSION 235 

spiritual character, the effluence of which is deeply 
felt by all who come within its sphere. The great 
poets have all felt this, none more deeply than 
Browning. His poetry says everywhere. Professor 
Corson tells us, " that through conversion, through 
wheeling into a new centre its spiritual system, the 
soul attains to saving truth." Perhaps the most 
striking instance of this in Browning's poetry is 
shown us in the character of Caponsacchi, in " The 
Ring and the Book." This gay young priest, 
with none too keen a conscience, and with all his 
thoughts of life and conduct perverted by the low 
standards of his brother ecclesiastics, is brought 
into close touch with Pompilia, the whitest, purest, 
womanliest soul in all fiction, and the regenerating 
effect of her life upon his is one of the most beauti- 
ful incidents in literature. The story, as Capon- 
sacchi himself tells it, " admits us," as Corson says, 
" to the very heart of Browning's poetry, — admits 
us to the great Idea . . . which no other poet . . . 
has brouo'ht out with the same deOTee of distinct- 
ness, — the great Idea which may be variously 
characterized as that of soul-kindling, soul-quicken- 
ing, adjustment of soul-attitude, regeneration, con- 
version, through personality.^''^ Pompilia had 
laid her commands on this stranger, calling him as 
a true knight of God to deliver her ; she had 
greatly trusted and honored him ; the subtle en- 
ergy of her pure soul had struck through and trans- 
figured his, and he passed from her presence into 
1 Introduction to Browning's Poetry, p. 59. 



236 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

newness of life. Thus he tells the judges what 
happened : — 

*' ' Thought ? ' nay, Sirs, what shall follow was not thought ; 
I have thought sometimes, and thought long and hard. 
I have stood before, gone round a serious thing. 
Tasked my whole mind to touch and clasp it close, 
As I stretch forth my arm to touch this bar. 
God and man, and what duty I owe both, — 
I dare to say I have confronted these 
In thought : but no such faculty helped here. 
I pat forth no thought, — powerless, all that night 
I paced the city : it was the first Spring. 
By the invasion I lay passive to, 
In rushed new things, the old were rapt away ; 
Alike abolished — the imprisonment 
Of the outside air, the inside weight o' the world 
That pulled me down. Death meant, to spurn the ground) 
Soar to the sky, — die well and you do that. 

" Sirs, I obeyed. Obedience was too strange, — 

This new thing that had been struck into me 

By the look o' the lady, — to dare disobey 

The first authoritative word. 'T was God's. 

I had been lifted to the level of her. 

Could take such sounds into my sense. I said 
' We too are cognizant o' the Master now ; 

She it is bids me bow the head ; how true, 

I am a priest ! I see the function here ; 

I thought the other way self-sacrifice : 

This is the true, seals up the perfect sum. 

I pay it, sit down, silently obey.' " 

From this hour the man is changed ; he makes 
you see and feel that old things had passed away ; 
that all things had become new ; the work had 
been wrought in him by the transforming power of 
a high and pure personality. 



CONVERSION 237 

Browning is not, you see, afraid of spiritual 
crises. He believes in them. He thinks that no 
better thing can happen to a man than to be 
roused, startled, shaken out of himself by some 
great experience. So he sings : — 

" Oh, we 're sunk enoug-h here, God kuows ! 

But not quite so sunk that moments, 
Sure though seldom, are denied us. 

When the spirit's true endowments 
Stand out plainly from its false ones, 

And apprise it if pursuing 
Or the right way or the wrong way, 

To its triumph or undoing, 

" There are flashes struck from midnights. 

There are fire-flames noondays kindle. 
Whereby piled-up honors perish, 

Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle, 
While just this or that poor impulse, 

Which for once had play unstifled, 
Seems the sole work of a lifetime, 

That away the rest have trifled." ^ 

It is in these critical hours of our experience that 
new conceptions of the meaning of life come to us, 
and we are renewed in the spirit of our minds. 

Such is the verdict of a great master of the lore 
of the spirit. " With Mr. Browning," says Ed- 
ward Dowden, " the moments are most glorious . . . 
in which a resolution that changes the current of life 
has been taken in reliance upon that insight which 
vivid emotion bestows; and those periods of our 
history are charged most fully with moral purpose 

1 Cristina. 



238 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

which take their direction from moments such as 
these." 

If these things are so, it is not only true that 
there is such a thing as conversion, but it is prob- 
able that it is a much more common thing, a much 
more homely and reasonable thing, than we have 
sometimes supposed. It is not only in the sanctu- 
ary and before the altar that this great experience 
comes to us. It may come even to the infant, ly- 
ing on its mother's breast, and looking into her 
face. By the mother's holy love, the child's soul 
may be transfigured, its tendencies to selfishness 
and animalism checked, its better impulses rein- 
forced. More is done. Dr. Bushnell says, " to fix 
the moral and religious character of children be- 
fore the age of language than after." The shrine 
at which most true conversions occur is the mo- 
ther's knee. But there are numberless other ex- 
periences in which the same transforming in:^uence 
falls upon the life, and changes the current of its 
thoughts and purposes, arresting the processes of 
moral decay, and turning the soul toward the firm 
choice of its own ideal. I am fain to believe that a 
great many men and women, whose names are not 
written on the rolls of the churches, have known 
the substance of this change which we call conver- 
sion, and are following the leadings of God's spirit 
toward the goal of perfect manhood and woman- 
hood. 

Yet I am equally convinced that there are many 
men and women who have not as yet passed 



CONVERSION 239 

through it, and to whom it is the one thing needful. 
Some of them are members of the church and some 
are not. But the one thing that seems clear con- 
cerning them is that degeneration is the word that 
best describes them. They are becoming less truth- 
ful, less honorable, less pure, less kind, more reck- 
less, more self-indulgent, more absorbed in things 
of the earth. They are going in this downward 
road against the protest of their own better na- 
tures, against the strivings of the Spirit of God. 
What they need is conversion. Culture will never 
do ; they must stop short in the road they are 
traveling and go the other way. They must re- 
enthrone the ideal to which they have so long been 
disobedient. They must highly resolve that hence- 
forth the law of the mind, and not the law of the 
members, shall bear rule in their lives, that by 
God's grace they will become the men and women 
that they ought: to be. They went down by sur- 
rendering, they must go up by fighting. They 
must call on Him who has kindled this desire in 
their hearts to help them in realizing it. And 
they must put themselves into an environment that 
will feed and stimulate the better elements of their 
lives instead of the baser ones. For all who will 
do this there is life and hope and the promise of 
victory. 



XII 

THE MEANING OF BAPTISM 

" What is the use of the sacraments ? " is the 
question now before us. 

A sacrament — sacramentum — in the Roman 
usage sometimes signified the oath taken by sol- 
diers at the time of their first enlistment, and some- 
times a sum of money deposited as security with a 
court by a suitor in entering upon litigation. The 
unsuccessful litigant forfeited this deposit to " sa- 
cred uses." This was the word which, in the West- 
ern Church, was applied to certain ceremonials of 
religion. It 73 not easy to connect the Latin word 
with the Christian rite ; perhaps the notion of a 
vow or pledge was in the minds of those who first 
spoke of these ceremonies as sacraments. The 
word is not in the New Testament ; I am not sure 
at what date the Christians first began to use it. 

In the Greek provinces this word was not used. 
^''Mysterioii " was the name which the Greek 
Fathers applied to these solemnities. That word 
denoted any secret which had been revealed, and 
especially the secret religious ceremonies practiced 
in the worship of the gods of Greece. Thus, in 
the earlier days, the Greek Christians described as 



THE MEANING OF BAPTISM 241 

mysteries what the Latins then knew, and we now 
know, as the sacraments. 

In the early church it would appear that but 
two of these rites possessed a sacramental charac- 
ter ; as the ecclesiasticism developed itself, others 
were added until no less than seven sacraments 
were recognized, — baptism, confirmation, the eu- 
charist, penance, extreme unction, holy orders, and 
matrimony. The Reformation reduced the number 
of sacraments to the original two observed by the 
apostolic churches, baptism and the Lord's Supper. 
The twenty-fifth of the English Articles of Reli- 
gion says : " There are two sacraments ordained of 
Christ our Lord in the gospel, that is to say. Bap- 
tism and the Supper of the Lord. Those five 
commonly called sacraments, that is to say. Con- 
firmation, Penance, Orders, Matrimony, and Ex- 
treme Unction, are not to be counted as sacraments 
of the gospel, being such as have grown partly out 
of the corrupt following of the Apostles, partly are 
states of life allowed in the Scriptures, but yet 
have not like nature of sacraments with Baptism 
and the Lord's Supper, for that they have not any 
visible sign or ceremony ordained of God." This 
is a fair statement of the attitude of the Reformed 
Churches toward this question of the number of 
sacraments. We are speaking for the Reformed 
Churches, and are considering therefore only those 
which they recognize. 

The origin of baptism, to which at the present 
time we shall confine our study, is not altogether 



242 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

clear. That it was adopted from the first as the 
initial rite, by which men were received into the 
Christian society, is not doubted. This initiation 
was accompanied by the application of water, in 
some way, to the person. But this ceremony was 
not invented for the Christian community. It was 
borrowed or adapted from something that had 
previously existed. This is almost the universal 
fact. The forms of ecclesiastical usage, the forms 
of ritual, are rarely manufactured out of whole 
cloth ; like political and social usages and forms 
they are generally taken over from previous sys- 
tems and altered somewhat to suit present needs. 
These ceremonial usages are largely the product of 
evolutionary forces, growths whose beginnings we 
can find in the earliest ages and often connected 
with crude ideas and barbarous lives. 

" Curious minds," says Professor Allen, " may 
seek to antedate the origin of these venerable rites, 
carrying it back into pre-Christian ages, even to 
savage customs before the beginning of history. 
But we must learn to outgrow the fallacy that the 
origin of a custom neutralizes its validity ; for cer- 
tainly no cruder, grosser origin could be demon- 
strated than is now set forth by the scientific prin- 
ciple of evolution for the origin and descent of 
man. If Jews or heathens can be shown to have 
anticipated such rites as these it only confirms their 
significance. We have got beyond the old apolo- 
getic which sought to prove that Christianity in 
its doctrines or ethics or practice was something 



THE MEANING OF BAPTISM 243 

entirely new to the world. Its coincidences with 
older religions or older ethical systems are so many 
fresh illustrations of its truth." ^ 

The immediate historical connection of Christian 
baptism is with the baptism of John the forerun- 
ner. John's baptism was primarily a baptism of 
repentance ; it signified the putting away of the 
old sins, and the cleansing of the life ; but it must 
have meant more than this, or Jesus would not 
have submitted to it. It must have possessed a 
social as well as an individual significance. I think 
that it denoted the formation of a new society to 
which by this simple ceremonial men were admit- 
ted. Probably the meaning of it was that the whole 
people had become so defiled and perverted in 
thought and life that a new Israel, a spiritual 
Israel, must be called forth and consecrated, and 
this was the form of admission into the new society, 
the kingdom of heaven. The baptism of Jesus 
was his initiation into this new society, of which he 
was indeed the head, but of which he would also 
be a member, identified with his brethren, and not 
separate from them. So that Christian baptism is 
thus really a continuation of John's baptism, a de- 
velopment out of it, carrying over the same central 
idea and adding to it other and higher concep- 
tions. 

We are expressly told that our Lord himself 
never baptized. His disciples were attached to him 
by no ceremonies or formalities whatever. Yet 
1 Christian Institutions, p. 400. 



244 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

v»^hen, in Jerusalem, on and after Pentecost, ad- 
herents were added to the Christian community, 
baptism was administered to them. That was the 
ceremony by which they signified their intention of 
being known as his followers. The apostles pro- 
claimed this as requisite for enrollment in the new 
commnnity. 

This initiatory rite involved two ideas : (1) The 
candidates were baptized " in the name of Jesus 
Christ." This implied a confession of faith in him 
as the Messiah and a vow of loyalty to him. His 
name was named upon them ; they owned that 
thej'- were his men ; they wore his favors ; they 
wished to be counted among his followers. Bap- 
tism was the sacramental oath of their enlistment 
in his service. (2) They were also baptized " for 
the remission of sins." This was quite in keeping 
with all the Jewish ideas connected with the rites of 
purification. Such a symbolical cleansing from past 
offenses was part of their own ritual. Doubtless 
the one great sin from which baptism on the day 
of Pentecost signified the absolution was the sin 
of putting to death the Messiah. But doubtless, 
also, they understood that with this sin they must 
seek to be cleansed from all their other transgres- 
sions, — to turn over a new leaf, and begin life 
afresh. This is that appeal of a good conscience, 
which Peter says that baptism is ; the application 
to the body of pure water signified the desire to 
be " cleansed from all filthiness of the flesh and 
the spirit," and the faith that those who thus iden- 



THE MEANING OF BAPTISM 245 

tified themselves in heart and life with Jesus 
Christ would obtain from him the inspiration and 
help by which they should gain this inward purity. 

Several interesting facts come to light as we 
study the customs of the early Christians in the 
light of all the new learning. The exploration of 
documents and monuments has made some thinsfs 
plain wMch were formerly in doubt. There seems 
to be little question that the Christians of the ear- 
liest times usually baptized by immersion. There 
was no hard and fast rule about it, but that mode 
was preferred. The references to the ordinance in 
the earliest writers bear this interpretation. One 
of the best and most authoritative sources is that 
little book entitled " The Teaching of the Twelve 
Apostles," which was discovered and published only 
a few years ago. This book was written as early as 
the middle of the second century, not more than 
fifty years after the death of the Apostle John, and 
it gives a clear account of the observances of the 
Christians of that time, in the form of specific di- 
rections to the churches and their ministers. Its 
words about ba23tism are as follows : — 

." Now concerning baptism, thus baptize ye : hav- 
ing first uttered all these things [having repeated 
the rules of conduct by which Christians must gov- 
ern their lives] baptize into the name of the 
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, in 
running water. But if thou hast not running 
water, baptize in other water ; and if thou canst 
not in cold, then in warm. But if thou hast neither, 



246 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

pour water upon the head thrice, into the name of 
Father and Son and Spirit." 

This makes it clear that the preference of these 
early Christians was for baptism by immersion in 
a river ; the use of a baptistery or tank would not 
have seemed good to them, though it would have 
been allowed if no stream were accessible ; and 
so would the method of affusion when that was 
more convenient. The decisive fact is that the 
mode ivas not imperative ; any reverent applica- 
tion of water to the body answered the require- 
ments of these sensible believers. Naturally, as 
men's conceptions became broader and more spir- 
itual, less and less emphasis would be placed on 
that which was merely outward. The question 
of the mode became more and more a question of 
indifferency. The further general adoption of 
affusion resulted from putting less emphasis on 
the external form. 

. It is also probable that the baptism of infants 
was unknown in the days of the apostles. The 
supposed references to infant baptism in the New 
Testament are dubious, and the arguments which 
seek to show that it must have taken the place 
of the Jewish rite of circumcision are far from con- 
clusive. There is not a hint of it in the " Teach- 
ing of the Twelve Apostles." " It is possible," 
says Professor Allen, " that infant baptism was 
practiced to some extent from the first, or even 
that it was administered by the apostles. But 
there is no demonstrative evidence on this point to 



THE MEANING OF BAPTISM 247 

which we can appeal. That the prevailing custom 
in the early church was adult baptism is admitted. 
Evidence that a change was taking place is abun- 
dant in the third century." ^ " Even among Chris- 
tian households," says Dean Stanley, "the in- 
stances of Chrysostom, Gregory, Nazianzen, Basil, 
Ephrem of Edessa, Augustine, Ambrose, are 
decisive proofs that [the baptism of infants] was 
not only not obligatory, but not usual. All these 
distinguished personages had Christian parents, 
and yet were not baptized until they reached matu- 
rity."2 

By many persons this admission will be regarded 
as decisive evidence that the practice of infant 
baptism is not warranted in the modern church. 
But this is not clear, ^e are doing a great many 
things to-day that those Christians of the first cen- 
turies never dreamed of doing : we ought to have 
a much larger conception of the meaning of Chris- 
tianity than they ever had. Perhaps the admis- 
sion of children to baptism may be due to a higher 
and truer view of the Christian society than was 
vouchsafed to them. 

We must not, however, deny that some supersti- 
tious and unworthy reasons were mingled with the 
higher and nobler ones in bringing about this 
chanofe. In truth the little children have had a 
great deal to do, in one way and another, with the 
development of our theology and our ethics ; our 



1 Christian Institutions, p. 406. 

2 Christian Institutions, p. 24. 



248 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTEIXES? 

relation to them Las brought out some of the worst 
as well as some of the best traits of human nature, 
and some of the darkest as well as some of the 
brightest phases of siDeculative thought. 

During these early Christian centuries infanti- 
cide was fearfully prevalent throughout the Eoman 
empire, and it is at least possible that the belief 
in the damnation of infants was strengthened by a 
Christian instinct which strove to suppress this 
horrible crime. The Christian who reproved his 
heathen neighbor for putting his little child to 
death would naturally magnify the injury to the 
child by emphasizing the misery to which it was 
consigned after death. And this deepening sense 
of possible peril to the little children may well 
have led to the practice of infant baptism. Doubt- 
less, too, the gradual growth of the belief in the 
saving efficacy of baj^tism had much to do with 
the introduction of the baptism of infants. Augus- 
tine it was who, by his tremendous logic, forced 
both these beliefs upon the church. That infants 
were doomed to eternal death for Adam's sin and 
that baptism is indispensable to salvation were 
ideas with which he darkened the mind of the Chris- 
tian church for a thousand 3'ears and more. Un- 
der the spell of this horrible doctrine parents has- 
tened to present their children at the font. This 
was not indeed any guarantee of their salvation ; 
for Augustine's dreadful decree of predestination 
still huno^ its black shadow over them. Xo infant 
could be saved who was not baptized ; but it was 



THE MEANING OF BAPTISM 249 

far from being true that all baptized infants were 
saved. God's electing grace never went outside 
the visible church to save any one, infant or adult ; 
his range of choice was strictly limited to those 
inside the church ; all outside were reprobate, 
whether or no ; among the baptized, he exercised 
his sovereign prerogative, and saved such of them 
as He was pleased to save. Children might not be 
saved if they were baptized, but could not be unless 
they were baptized. It was the prevalence of this 
belief that made infant baptism universal in the 
church after the middle of the fifth century. 

Augustine's doctrine of predestination was con- 
siderably modified by the Catholic theologians in 
later years ; but his doctrine that baptism is in- 
dispensable to salvation has held its ground in the 
Eomau Catholic Church to this day. It is not now 
believed by good Catholics that unbaptized infants 
dying in infancy are tormented in hell fire ; they 
are consigned to an abode of comparative comfort ; 
but they are forever excluded from the presence of 
God. And the belief of the extreme High Church 
party in the Anglican Church is, I believe, sub- 
stantially the same. 

All this is very melancholy. To believe that the 
Father in heaven can permit the little ones who 
are taken out of this world before they come to 
vears of discretion to be forever exiled from his 
presence because of the neglect or the ignorance of 
their parents, — because no consecrating drops of 
water have fallen upon their foreheads, — is to take 



250 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

a strange view of his character. And so far as the 
prevalence of a belief like this has tended to bring 
about the change from the adult baptism of the 
apostolic days to the infant baptism of later days, 
we may deplore the means, whatever we may say 
of the end. 

It is, however, true that God often makes the 
wrath of man to praise Him ; and the modern prac- 
tice may be a good one, even though the paths 
which have led to it are dark and tortuous. Most 
of those who in these days present their children 
at the font for baptism do so, not because they 
have any fear that the omission of the rite will con- 
sign their children to perdition, but for other and 
far worthier reasons. And I suppose that even 
while the black spectre of infant damnation was 
filling the minds of believers with terror, there was 
growing in the church a larger conception of the 
relation of men to one another and to God, which 
made way for the admission of the children to the 
rights and privileges of the Christian church. 

" Adult baptism," says Professor Allen, " stood 
for the principle of individualism, demanding in- 
telligence as the condition of repentance and faith 
and the personal vow of obedience as the ground 
of its proper administration. But the social aim 
of the chui'ch, looking to the welfare of all, taking 
men in their collective capacity as a whole, the 
need for an institution representing the solidarity of 
the Christian world in its common hopes and fears 
— this necessity influenced the transition from 



THE MEANING OF BAPTISM 251 

adult to infant baptism. The principle of individ- 
ualism, the characteristic of the church of the first 
three centuries, was passing into desuetude. The 
church had a work to do for the people which they 
could not do for themselves. The obligation of 
humanity to the church became universal. It was 
to become no longer a question of ' joining the 
church,' as the expression goes ; the union of indi- 
viduals no longer created the church. The world 
of man was henceforth to be created within the 
church ; infants from their birth were to be re- 
ceived into its fold. The transition at least bore 
witness to the faith that all men were capable of 
receiving a divine nurture, and that education is 
the divine method of evoking the image of God in 
man." ^ 

It is this idea of the solidarity of the generations 
which finds expression in the ordinance of infant 
baptism. It is the idea that families ought to be 
Christian, and not individuals merely ; that there 
is an organic social bond which Christianity should 
recognize and sanctify. It is the idea that the 
Christian community is one in which the whole 
household should be included ; that it is not a so- 
ciety which takes in parents and leaves out their 
little children. 

In the Society of Friends every one born of par- 
ents belonging to the Society is a birthright mem- 
ber. That is the idea which lies at the foundation 
of infant baptism, though it has not been so frankly 

1 Christian Institutions, p. 407. 



252 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

avowed as it ought to have been. Is it not true 
that the children of Christian parents should have 
a birthright membership in the Christian commu- 
nity, — in the kingdom of heaven ? Are they not 
heirs of the kingdom? And should not the fact 
of their inheritance be solemnly recognized and 
declared ? 

The state recognizes and affirms the fact that 
our children are organically connected with it. 
That parents should be members of the common- 
wealth while their children are aliens would be an 
intolerable conception. The children are not called 
on to perform all the duties of citizenship until they 
have attained to a certain age ; but the rights and 
privileges of citizenship are theirs from the moment 
of their birth. The youngest infant of either sex 
in this city is just as much a citizen of Ohio and 
of the United States as is Governor Bushnell or 
President McKinley. The state is thus, in every 
theory of her constitution, in the whole practice 
of her administration, the mother of all the chil- 
dren born within her jurisdiction. Shall the church 
be less motherly than the state ? 

This, I say, is the real belief which underlies the 
modern practice of infant baptism. It is the belief 
that the constitution of the Christian common- 
wealth ought to be such that children should be 
recognized as forming a part of it. For I do 
not think that there is any intelligible theory of 
infant baptism which does not recognize the bap- 
tized children as members of the Christian Society, 



THE MEANING OF BAPTISM 253 

just as truly members as the children are citizens 
of the commonwealth ; not yet fully entered into 
all the obligations of membership, but fully en- 
titled to all the privileges of membership. It is 
well that they should be called upon, when they 
are old enough to understand what it means, to 
come forward and assume for themselves these 
obligations ; but let them feel from their earliest 
childhood that they are not outside the fellowship 
of the church, but within its sheltering arms and 
under its nurturing care. 

Three theories of infant baptism are now held 
and taught : — 

The first is that of the Roman Catholics and 
High Anglicans, that baptism regenerates the soul ; 
that in the rite of baptism a spiritual change is 
wrought, by which original sin is purged away, 
and a Christian character is imparted. I will not 
dwell on this theory, for it is not likely that any of 
us are inclined to believe it. 

The second is the theory of the Reformed 
Churches generally that infant baptism is the seal 
of a covenant made by God with believers only ; a 
promise that He will be their God and their chil- 
dren's God. In baptism, it is supposed, believers 
ratify that covenant and claim that promise, and 
the children of the covenant are thus placed in a 
more favorable condition and may expect a greater 
measure of God's favor than other children not 
thus consecrated. The ordinance, that is to say, 
while it does not secure their regeneration, does 



254 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

make some change in the relation which they sus- 
tain to God. 

I cannot bring myself to the acceptance of this 
theory. I cannot believe that God cares any more 
for the baptized children than for the unbaptized ; 
nor that this act of its parents and the church 
changes in any way his fatherly relation to anjr 
little child. 

The third theory assumes that the fact of the 
diviue Fatherhood is a universal fact ; that every 
child who is born into this world is God's child 
when he is born. This is the fact which Jesus 
came to reveal, — the one fundamental truth of 
the Christian religion. All that any man needs to 
do in order to secure his own salvation and to fulfill 
his destiny is to accept that fact and conform his 
conduct to it. To be filial and obedient children 
of our Father in heaven is to fulfill all righteous- 
ness. Now the rite of baptism simply declares 
this fact of the Fatherhood of God, and solemnly 
bears witness that this child is his child ; putting 
upon him the name of the Father and the Son and 
the Hol}^ Ghost ; publicly numbering him as one 
of that great family which comprehends every fa- 
therhood on earth and in heaven. The rite does 
not make this child God's child ; it simply recog- 
nizes and declares the fact. It does not change 
God's relation to the child in any wise ; it only 
joyfully confesses the relation which we believe to 
exist between God and this child. I do not know 
that I can more clearly present the true signifi- 



THE MEANING OF BAPTISM 255 

cance of infant baptism, according to this view, 
than by quoting the words which are spoken to 
parents when they bring their children to my own 
church to be baptized : — 

"In presenting these children for baptism you 
confess your faith in the imiversal Fatherhood of 
Him who said, 'All souls are mine,' and in the tender 
care and the redeeming love of Him who said, ' Of 
such is the Kino-dom of heaven.' You brinof them 
to Him that they may be baptized into His name, 
and declared to be His children. You j^romise to 
teach them, among the earliest lessons of their 
lives, that they are His children ; that they owe to 
Him the love of their hearts and the service of their 
lives : that the beo-innino- of wisdom is to trust Him 

o o 

and obey Him. And you solemnly covenant with 
Him to-day, that not only by the teaching of jouv 
lips, but by the holy influence of consecrated lives 
you will seek to reveal to them the mighty grace 
which is able to save us from our sins, to comfort 
us in our sorrows, and to bring us home to God. 
Do you thus promise ? " 

Thus the rite is intended to express and declare 
the universal Fatherhood of God ; the child's rela- 
tion to Him is the fact which it emphasizes. It 
does not create this fact ; it simply confesses and 
declares it. The child's relation to God is not 
changed by baptism ; but the parents and the 
church unite to acknowledge this relation, and pro- 
mise to teach the child to accept it for himself. 
The salvation of the child is not assured bv it : for 



256 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

though he is one of God's children, he may be dis- 
obedient and rebellious. The responsibility of the 
parent to bring him up in the fear and love of God 
is not created by this rite, for it existed before ; 
but it is confessed by the parent, and witnessed by 
the church. And the church, in whose name this 
is done, does thus assume for itself a responsibility 
for the child whose name is thus written upon her 
roll, to surround him with good influences and seek 
to guide his feet into the way of life. 

Thus, to my mind, the rite of infant bajDtism is 
the simple and sublime testimony to the most mo- 
mentous fact which the human mind can entertain, 
that every human beino- is a child of the eternal 
Father, made to love Him, and know Him, and trust 
in Him, fitted for communion with Him. Doubt- 
less these children of ours inherit from us and from 
those who have gone before us many infirmities 
and evil tendencies ; doubtless there are eyil dispo- 
sitions in them that will require the regenerating 
grace of God ; but after all the one thing that 
makes them precious is their inheritance of the 
divine nature ; they are God's children in a deeper 
sense even than they are our children : his image 
is stamped on them, and they are made to grow up 
in his love and in his likeness. If this is true it is 
the one truth which means more than every other ; 
the one truth which we ought to keep before our 
own minds and before the minds of our children in 
all our training of them ; and the rite which ex- 
presses this great truth respecting the divine par- 



THE MEANING OF BAPTISM 257 

entage of our cliildren and the destiny to which 
God's love is calling them is one which, I think, 
ought to appeal to the heart of every Christian 
parent. 

** In each such little child,*' says Dean Stanley, 
" our Saviour saw, and we may see, the promise of 
a glorious future. In those little hands folded in 
unconscious repose, in those bright eyes first awak- 
ening to the outer world, in that soft forehead un- 
furrowed by the ruffle of care or sin, He saw, and 
we may see, the undeveloped rudimental instru- 
ments of the labor and intelligence and energy of 
a whole life. And not only so, — not only in hope, 
but in actual reality, does the blessing on little 
children, whether as expressed in the gospel story 
or as implied in infant baptism, acknowledge the 
excellency and value of the childlike soul. Xot 
once only in his life, but again and again he held 
them up to his disciples as the best corrective of 
the ambitions and passions of mankind." ^ 

If such is the significance of baptism when ad- 
ministered to an infant, what does it signify when 
administered to an adult ? Pundamentally the 
same thing. What the child's parents declare re- 
specting their child, the man declares for himself. 
He has come to recognize the solemn and momen- 
tous fact that he is God's child, and he wishes to 
confess that fact and enroll himself as a member 
of the household of faith. I do not know that 
anything is involved in adult baptism which is not 

1 Christian Institutions, p. 27. 



258 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

expressed when you say that the man baptized ac- 
knowledges and seeks to realize his filial relation to 
his Father in heaven. Doubtless this must imply 
penitence for past unfilial conduct, trust in the 
divine forgiveness, and the wish and purpose to 
seek the divine inspiration and help in living a 
better life. And doubtless also in confessing the 
universal Fatherhood, he must acknowledge the 
human brotherhood, and seek to put himself into 
brotherly relations with all men. It is all summed 
up when we say that the man who intelligently 
seeks Christian baptism simply expresses by that 
rite his acceptance of the truth of the divine Fa- 
therhood and the human brotherhood as revealed 
to the world by Jesus Christ, and his wish and 
purpose to follow Jesus Christ in conforming his 
life to the great truths thus revealed. 

But what is the use of the baptism? What 
value has the mere act of sprinkling water upon 
the forehead, with the pronunciation of a certain, 
form of words ? 

Of course this external rite possesses no inherent 
efficacy. It is purely symbolic. But symbols have 
their uses. Some of us care but little for them ; 
to others they signify much. There is a ring on 
somebody's finger that is not worth very much 
as an article of merchandise, but that no money 
would buy because of what it symbolizes. There 
are faded flowers somewhere that you would not 
willingly part with ; they tell you something that 
you like to hear. There are buttons, badges, that 



THE MEANING OF BAPTISM 259 

some of us wear — slight things, but very signifi- 
cant. There is that flag flying from the dome over 
yonder. AVhat is it ? A piece of weather-beaten 
bunting ? It is a symbol, — the symbol of our na- 
tionality. Is it not a silly thing, a childish thing, 
for a great nation to have such a symbol ? Would 
we not all be just as loyal, just as patriotic, without 
it ? No. That flag has a great deal to do in edu- 
cating, deepening, intensifying, the national feeling 
of the American people. Human beings are so 
made that their thought is awakened, their imagi- 
nation kindled, their affection called forth by the 
use of symbols. The Founder of our faith knew 
men ; He knew that a simple symbolic rite, like 
baptism, would be of gTeat service in gathering his 
followers and building his kingdom. It has been 
of immense value in all the past, and it will be in 
all the future. It is destined to mean a great deal 
more in the future than it has ever meant in the 
past. When all the superstitions and heathenish 
notions that have fastened upon it shall be stripped 
away ; when it is no longer associated in men's 
minds with anything like magic ; when it is under- 
stood simply as the symbol of membership in that 
great household of faith and love of which the Fa- 
ther in heaven is the Head and Jesus Christ is the 
Elder Brother, the number of those who claim it 
for themselves and for their children will increase 
and multiply, until the glad confession of the uni- 
versal Fatherhood shall bring to the world the 
thousand years of peace. 



XIII 

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LORD's SUPPER 

The history of the sacrament of the Lord's Sup- 
per is well worth studying. It would be interest- 
ing, if it were possible to go into it carefully, to 
present in picturesque detail the changes which 
have taken place in the theory and in the adminis- 
tration of this rite from the earliest ages to the 
latest times and throughout the length and breadth 
of Christendom. That would make a lively story. 
The notions entertained have been so manifold and 
curious, the usages followed so quaint and various, 
that the narrative would afford a great deal of di- 
version and not a little instruction. One is hardly 
prepared to estimate rightly the forms and institu- 
tions of our common Christianity until he has 
traced their development through all its historical 
stages. It is, however, but a few glimpses that we 
shall get of this remarkable evolution ; those who 
desire a graphic account of it will find it in Dean 
Stanley's volume entitled " Christian Institutions." 

We have the story of the first celebration of the 
Supper in each of the first three Gospels ; the nar- 
rative in John tells us of a last Supper of our Lord 
with the twelve, but gives no hint of any emblem- 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 261 

atic or sacramental character. In Mark's Gospel 
we read that the Master and his disciples partook 
of the passover feast together in an upper chamber 
in Jerusalem ; " and as they were eating, he took 
bread, and when he had blessed he brake it and 
gave to them, and said. Take ye ; this is my body. 
And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks 
he gave to them, and they all drank of it. And 
he said unto them. This is my blood of the cove- 
nant which is shed for many." Matthew adds to 
this last phrase the words " unto remission of sins." 
Luke adds the injunction, " This do in remem- 
brance of me." It is a little strange that Mat- 
thew and Mark both omit this memorial feature. 
Neither of the first two Gospels gives us any hint 
of any future observance of the Supper. In the 
First Epistle to the Corinthians Paul, in a more 
elaborate account of the first Supper, represents 
the Lord as thrice repeating the idea that the sup- 
per was to be eaten in remembrance of him, " to 
show forth the Lord's death until he come." Un- 
doubtedly Luke, who was a traveling companion 
of Paul, reflects in his Gospel Paul's understand- 
ing of the ordinance. 

As to the manner of its first observance we have 
ample sources of information. Stanley's descrip- 
tion brings the scene clearly before us : — 

" It was the evening feast, of which every Jew- 
ish household partook on the night, as it might be, 
before or after the Passover. They were collected 
together, the Master and his twelve disciples, in 



262 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

one of tlie large upper rooms above the open court 
of the inn or caravanserai to which they had been 
guided. The couches or mats were spread round 
the room, as in all Eastern houses ; and on those 
the guests lay reclined, three on each couch, ac- 
cording to the custom derived from the universal 
usage of the Greek or Roman world. The ancient 
Jewish usage of eating the Passover standing had 
given w^ay, and a symbolical meaning was given to 
what w^as in fact a more social fashion, that they 
might lie there like kings, with the ease becoming 
free men. 

" There they lay, the Lord in the midst, next to 
him the beloved disciple, and next to him the eldest, 
Peter. Of the position of the others we know no- 
thing. There was placed on the table, in front of 
the guests, one, two, perhaps four cups or rather 
bowls. There is at Genoa a bowl w^hich professes 
to be the original chalice, — a mere fancy, no doubt, 
— but probably representing the original shape. 
This bowl was filled with wine mixed up wath wa- 
ter. The wine of old times was always mixed with 
water. . . . Beside the cup was one or more of the 
large thin Passover calies of unleavened bread, 
such as may still, at the Paschal season, be seen in 
all Jewish houses. It is this of which the outw^ard 
form has been preserved in the thin round wafer 
which is used in the Roman Catholic and Lutheran 
churches. It was the recollection of the unleav- 
ened bread of the Israelites when they left Eg}^3t. 
As the wine was mixed with water, so the bread 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 2G3 

was probably served up with fish. The two always 
went together. We see examples of it in the ear- 
lier meals in the Gospel, and so doubtless it was in 
this last. Close beside this cake was another re- 
collection of the Passover, — a thick sop, which 
was supposed to be like the Egyptian clay and in 
which the fragments of the Paschal cake were 
dipped. Round the table, leaning on each other's 
breasts, reclining on those couches, were the twelve 
disciples and their Master. From mouth to mouth 
passed to and fro the eager inquiry and the startled 
look when they heard that one of them should be- 
tray him. Across the table and from side to side 
were shot the earnest questions from Peter, from 
Jude, from Thomas, from Philip. In each face 
might have been traced the character of each re- 
ceiving a different impression from what he saw 
and heard — and in the midst of all this the ma- 
jestic, sorrowful countenance of the Master of the 
Feast as he drew toward him the several cups and 
the thin transparent cake, and pronounced over 
each the Jewish blessing with those few words 
which have become immortal." ^ 

Such was the scene in the upper chamber. It 
was the same night in which he was betrayed — 
the last night of his life on the earth. Is it any 
wonder that the incidents of this Supper made a 
deep impression upon his disciples ? Even if he 
had laid no commands on them, it Avould have been 
very natural for them to commemorate in some 

1 Christian Institutions, pp. 35, 36. 



264 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

way an event so full of tender significance. And 
it seems clear tliat some snch commemoration was 
observed by them very soon after his death. The 
character of this observance was not, however, at 
the beginning anything like what we now know as 
the Sacrament of the Eucharist. It began in an 
institution known as the Agape or Love-Feast. 
The disciples were wont, in the earliest days, to 
come together, as many of them as could every 
evening, for their ordinary evening meal. Very 
strong was the feeling among them that they were 
one family ; they made that fact manifest in all 
their social relations. That there was a thoroughly 
organized communism may be doubted, but the 
spirit was there that made all things common. 
When there were too many of them to meet in one 
assembly they came together evening after evening 
in little groups, — neighborhood sociables, we might 
almost call them, — and had their supper together. 
Always at these suppers the broken bread and the 
common cup commemorated the crucified and risen 
Lord. Every such social supper was a Lord's 
Supper. The distinction between the sacred and 
the secular was obliterated. There was no special 
sacramental service, such as we now celebrate. 

Paul gives us, in his first letter to the Corinthi- 
ans, the reason why the service which we now re- 
gard as sacramental was separated from the social 
feast. Abuses had crept into this common obser- 
vance. The disciples were hardly spiritual enough 
to keep this celebration up to the high-water mark 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 265 

at which it originated. They began to use it as an 
occasion of feasting ; and instead of emphasizing 
the common life of the brotherhood, it gave oppor- 
tunity for selfish greediness and coarse disregard 
for the feelings and the rights of others. Those 
who came early ate up all the provision, even gor- 
ging themselves, so that those who came late had 
nothing left. This state of things Paul sharply 
reproves. "When therefore ye assemble your- 
selves together," he says, " it is not possible to eat 
the Lord's Supper ; for in your eating each one 
taketh before other his own supper ; and one is 
hungry and another is drunken. What? have ye 
not houses to eat and to drink in ? or despise ye 
the church of God and put to shame them that 
have not ? What shall I say unto you ? Shall I 
praise you in this ? I praise you not. . . . Where- 
fore, my brethren, when ye come together to eat, 
wait one for another. If any man is hungry let 
him eat at home, that your coming together be not 
unto judgment." ^ 

For such reasons the sacramental and the social 
gatherings gradually fell apart, and while the love- 
feasts were maintained for several centuries — in 
some portions of the church longer than in other 
portions — the Lord's Supper was finally separated 
from them, and became a strictly religious cere- 
mony, gradually taking upon itself a character 
quite different from that which was given to it in 
the apostolic days. Some of these changes will be 
indicated in the briefest manner. 

1 1 Cor. xi. 



266 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

The posture of the disciples at the first supper 
was, as we have seen, a reclining posture. No- 
where in the world is this form now observed. In 
some cnurches the communicants receive the sacra- 
ment standing, in some sitting, in some kneeling ; 
while the Pope, for his part, because of a long dis- 
pute as to what his attitude should be, has appar- 
ently adopted one which is slightly ambiguous, and 
leans upon his chair in such a way as to make it 
difficult for onlookers to determine whether he is 
sitting or standing. If form or mode is an essential 
element of a sacrament, I see not why the form 
or mode is not as important in the one sacrament 
as in the other ; and if the example of our Lord 
and his apostles is to be strictly followed, nobody 
in the world is properly observing the sacrament 
of the Lord's Supper. I presume that we shall ad- 
mit that the posture is not a vital matter ; that the 
sacrament may be just as profitably administered 
in another mode than that followed by our Lord 
and the twelve, — to those who are standing, or 
kneeling, or sitting, as religiously as to those who 
are lying down. 

The time of the observance has also been 
changed, nearly or quite universally. It was ori- 
ginally, as we have seen, coupled with the evening 
meal ; and the name of the Supper still clings 
to it in our usage — still more closely in the Ger- 
man name of Abendmahl. In the second century, 
however, for various prudential reasons it was 
changed to an early morning hour ; and now 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 267 

tliroLighout the world this is the ordinary obser- 
vance. Some of those who make most of it put 
great emphasis on the necessity of early commun- 
ion, and think that it is not properly adminis- 
tered at any other time of the day. 

The form of the bread in the ancient church was 
•that of flat circular cakes, such as we may see in 
Jewish homes about Easter time. Some of the 
churches, stickling for small things, have tried to 
preserve this form. But " it is evident," as Dean 
Stanley says, " that the Roman and Lutheran 
churches, by adhering to the literal form of the old 
institution, have lost its meaning; and the Reformed 
churches, whilst certainly departing from the origi- 
nal form, have preserved the meaning. The bread 
of common life, which was in the first three centu- 
ries represented by the thin unleavened cake, is 
now represented by the ordinary loaf." ^ 

Both bread and wine were originally given to all 
the communicants. For certain reasons the cup 
was withheld from the laity, during the Middle 
Ages, and the dispute over this question between 
Catholics and Reformers resulted in bloody wars. 
In this quarrel neither side can be wholly justified. 
The withholding of the cup from the laity was the 
result of a fear lest the consecrated wine, which 
had been transformed into the blood of the Re- 
deemer, might be spilled on the ground. That 
seems to us a superstitious fear. But the Catholic 
doctrine was that the real presence of the Saviour 

1 Christian Institutions, p. 53. 



268 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

was in either of the consecrated elements ; and that 
a communicant who had partaken of one of them 
had received aU the grace that the sacrament could 
impart. This was, in effect, saying that the effi- 
cacy of the sacrament was not dependent on the 
material elements, which was, in one sense, a 
broader and more spiritual view than that of the- 
Reformers. " When the Bohemian Utraquists," 
says Dean Stanley, " fought with desperate energy 
to recover the use of the cup, they were in one sense 
doubtless fighting the cause of the laity against the 
clergy, of old Catholic latitude against modern Ro- 
man restrictions. But with that obliquity of pur- 
pose which sometimes characterizes the fiercest 
ecclesiastical struggles, the Roman Church, on the 
other hand, was fighting the battle of an enlarged 
and liberal view of the sacraments against a fanat- 
ical insistence on the necessity of a detailed con- 
formity to ancient usage." ^ 

There was small reason, however, for sympathy 
for either party. The superstition of the one side 
matched the narrowness of the other. The Bohe- 
mian reformers won a temporary victory, and car- 
ried the communion cup on a pole, as the banner 
of their triumphant legions ; but their triumph was 
of short duration ; the thing they had fought for 
was not worth winning, and they soon relapsed into 
abject conformity to the old ritual. 

Later Reformers, however, restored the use of 
the cup ; the Roman Catholic Church alone with- 

^ Christian Institutions, p. 104. 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 269 

holds it from the laity. In the Greek Church the 
bread and wine are mingled, and administered to 
communicants with a spoon. 

One usage in connection with the Lord's Sup- 
per was universal in the ancient church, and per- 
sisted until the thirteenth century, but has now 
nearly disappeared from Christendom. This was 
the holy kiss, the kiss of peace — which is fre- 
quently enjoined in the Epistles. At the moment 
when the words of the service known as the " Sur- 
sum Corda " were spoken, — 

" Lift up your hearts ! 
We lift them up unto the Lord," ^ 

the whole congregation exchanged this salutation. 
" Sometimes," says Stanley, " the men kissed the 
men ; sometimes the women the women ; sometimes 
it was without distinction." It was, I believe, 
finally decreed that kissing should be restricted to 
those of the same sex. In the thirteenth century 
this observance was greatly modified. A small 
tablet of wood, called the pax or pax board, on 
which was engraved some scriptural scene or sym- 
bol, was introduced into the service ; this was 
kissed by the officiating priest at the proper time, 
then handed by the acolytes to the other clergy to 
be kissed by them, and then passed through the 
congregation for the same purpose. The kiss of 
peace had been the symbol of fraternity ; the kiss- 
ing of the pax was the symbol of a symbol. This 
wooden substitute does not seem to have been very 
popular, and soon fell into desuetude. 



270 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

Among the Coptic Christians the kiss of peace 
is still part of the communion service. " Travel- 
ers now living," says Dean Stanley, " have had 
their faces stroked and been kissed by the Coptic 
priest, in the cathedral at Cairo, whilst at the same 
moment everybody was kissing everybody else 
throughout the church. Had any primitive Chris- 
tians been told that the time would come when 
this, the very sign of brotherhood and sisterhood, 
would be absolutely proscribed in the Christian 
church, they would have thought that this must be 
the sign of unprecedented persecution or unprece- 
dented unbelief. It is impossible to imagine the 
omission of any act more sacred, more significant, 
more necessary (according to the view which then 
prevailed), to the edification of the service." ^ In 
the Western church, one small Scottish sect, the 
Glassites or Sandemanians, — to which, by the 
way, the illustrious Faraday belonged, — still ob- 
serves this rite. This sect also keeps the ancient 
love-feast and practices feet-washing, like the Tun- 
kers of America. 

About the same time that infant baptism began 
to be practiced, the administration of the com- 
munion to infants was also introduced into the 
early church. Doubtless the same idea at that 
time underlay both usages, — the idea that the 
sacrament possessed some inherent or magical 
power. Baptism regenerated the child ; the Lord's 
Supper also imparted spiritual life and vigor to 

^ Christian Institutions, p. 03. 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 271 
him. The infant in both cases was unconscious : 



the sacrament produced its effect upon him with- 
out any cooperation of his intelligence or his will. 
It is what is called an opus operatiim ; it did its 
work upon the soul in just the same way that food 
or medicine does its work upon the body. I do not 
quite understand why infant communion has been 
abandoned in the Roman Catholic Church ; the 
Greek Church still practices it. Those who believe 
that infant baptism signifies the parents' belief in 
the universal Fatherhood of God, and is the enroll- 
ment of the child by name in that household of 
faith to which by birth he belongs, have good rea- 
son for continuing this practice, although they may 
not believe that any change whatever is made by 
it in the character of the child ; but infant com- 
munion could not of course be practiced unless it 
were believed that the rite possesses some inhe- 
rent power of changing the child's nature. If it 
does possess that power, there is no good reason 
why it should not be administered to infants as 
well as to adults. 

The Supper, as observed by the first disciples, 
was, as we have seen, a simple evening meal, at 
which the bread as broken by our Lord, and the wine 
as poured forth by him, reminded the partakers of 
his human life among them, and his death of self- 
sacrifice for them. But when the Lord's Supper 
was separated from the love-feast and erected into 
a special ecclesiastical service, other and higher 
meanings began to be attributed to it. " As early 



272 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

as tlie second century," says one authority, " Justin 
Martyr and Irenaeus advance the opinion that the 
mere bread and wine became, in the Eucharist, some- 
thing higher, — the earthly something heavenly, — 
without, however, ceasing to be bread and wine. 
Though these views were opposed by some emi- 
nent individual Christian teachers, . . . yet, both 
among the people and in the ritual of the church, 
more particularly after the fourth century, the 
miraculous or supernatural view of the Lord's 
Supper gained ground. After the third century 
the office of presenting the bread and wine came 
to be confined to the ministers or priests. This 
practice arose from, and in turn strengthened, the 
notion which was gaining ground, that in this act 
of presentation by the priest a sacrifice similar to 
that once offered up in the death of Christ, though 
bloodless, was ever anew presented to God. This 
still deepened the feeling of mysterious significance 
and importance with which the rite of the Lord's 
Supper was viewed, and led to that gradually 
increasing splendor of celebration which, under 
Gregory the Great (590), took the form of the 
mass." 

Out of this gradually grew the doctrine of tran- 
substantiation, — the belief that under the hands 
of the consecrating priest the bread and wine of 
the sacrament become the actual body and blood of 
Christ. This is the doctrine to-day of both the 
Roman and the Greek Catholic churches. 

At the time of the Reformation this doctrine 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 273 

furnished one of the battle-grounds of the Reform- 
ers, who not only rejected the Eoman Catholic 
doctrine, but differed widely among themselves. 

Luther, for his part, was rather conservative in 
his views of this sacrament. He rejected transub- 
stantiation, but substituted for it what the theo- 
logians call coTi-substantiation, what he called im- 
panation. He denied that the bread and wine of 
the sacrament do themselves become the body and 
blood of Christ; but he maintained that the real 
body and blood of Christ are actually there, where 
the bread and wine are, in, with, and under it. The 
bread and wine are still bread and wine ; no magi- 
cal change has passed upon them ; but just as the 
divine nature of Christ was present with his human 
nature, so the real body and blood of Christ are 
present with the bread and the wine. 

Zwingli, on the other hand, maintained that the 
rite was purely symbolic ; that the words of the 
Lord, "This is my body," "This is my blood," 
meant only, " This represents my body and my 
blood " — that the service was simply commemo- 
rative. 

Calvin undertook to maintain a view midway 
between these two, — that the bread and wine are 
in themselves mere symbols ; but that at the mo- 
ment of partaking of them the faithful are brought 
into a real spiritual union with Christ and receive 
divine grace immediately from him ; that the sup- 
'per is a medium through which grace is imparted 
to the believing soul. 



274 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

Such are the three principal explanations of the 
nature of this sacrament. In the Koman Catholic 
view, a miraculous or supernatural transformation 
of the substance of the bread and wine into the 
body and blood of Christ takes place when the ele- 
ments are consecrated ; and thus the priest offers 
upon the altar a real sacrifice — the unbloody sac- 
rifice — to God, by which his favor is secured. 
These miraculously transformed elements also pos- 
sess in themselves efficacy, by which the moral and 
spiritual health and strength of those partaking of 
them is increased. The question respecting the 
attitude of the recipient is one with which the 
Roman Catholic theologians do not always deal 
satisfactorily. But I think that I may say that 
the Catholic doctrine teaches that any baptized 
person who is not in mortal sin receives some bene- 
fit from the sacrament if he simply does not resist 
its influence ; if he is acquiescent when he partakes 
of it. The sacrament, by an energy of grace which 
is inherent in it, will impart benefit to him if he 
does not counteract it by his will. Of course it 
is taught that the more perfectly responsive he is 
to its action, the more good it will do him; but 
even to those who are passively acquiescent it will 
communicate some grace. There is an efficacious 
power in the sacrament itself which does not de- 
pend on the exercise of faith by the recipient. 

I do not state this theory to controvert it : for it 
is probable that few of my readers believe in the 
miracle of the mass, or regard the sacrament as pos- 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 275 

sessing any such inherent power to change charac- 
ter ; though there are those among our Episcopal 
brethren whose theory of the efficacy of the sacra- 
ments approximates to the Eoman Catholic theory. 

To most of us the sacrament is a symbolical 
rather than a literal transaction ; a memorial and 
not a miracle ; supernatural only as everything 
spiritual is supernatural. 

Let us see if we can state, with some carefulness, 
just what this sacrament does signify to you and 
me. 

In the first place, it is a memorial of One very 
dear to us, — One to whom we owe more than to 
any one else who has ever lived upon the earth. 
We think it well to cherish the memory of great 
benefactors ; surely here is One who has done more 
for this world than any other born of woman. It 
was Theodore Parker who apostrophized him in 
the words : " O thou Great Friend to all the sons 
of men ! " I am speaking as a student of history 
when I say that the life and death of Jesus Christ 
have meant more for good to this world than 
any other event which has happened upon this 
planet. It must be well for us to recall, now and 
then, with some care and seriousness, an event like 
this and to spend a little time in reflecting upon it. 

The question of the frequency of such obser- 
vances is one of expediency. I own that I find my- 
self rather inclining, of late years, to the Scottish 
idea that a less frequent observance woidd be more 
salutary. If we had the sacrament three times 



276 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

a year instead of six, — on the first of February, 
the first of June, and the first of October, say, — 
and then admitted members not merely on com- 
munion Sundays, but on the first Sunday of every 
month, — my belief is that we should gain more 
than we should lose in impression and benefit 
from the celebration. 

This is, however, a subordinate matter. The 
value of such a commemorative service to any one 
who rightly uses it cannot, I think, be questioned. 
It must be profitable for us to recall, as we sit be- 
fore this table, the life of this Great Friend of 
ours, the words of wisdom and gentleness that he 
spoke, the great truths that he made plain to us, 
the gracious ministry of help and healing and sym- 
pathy to which his life was given, the patience 
with which he bore the spite and scorn and violence 
of the brutal men whom he sought to bless, the 
unresisting meekness with which he went to death, 
conquering hate by enduring it, and winning in his 
death the contrite love of the men who slew him. 
To spend an hour, now and then, in simply recall- 
ing all that we know about him, in meditating 
upon this character, in comparing our own habitual 
thinking and living with this standard, must be a 
profitable exercise for every one of us. 

Besides, there is a certain relation to ourselves 
which this suffering life sustains which we must 
not ignore. We are contemplating a vicarious sac- 
rifice — not a vicarious punishment, which is a very 
different thing. The sacrifice which a mother 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 277 

makes for her child is a vicarious sacrifice ; she 
suffers for him, on his behalf, but she is not pun- 
ished in his stead. The central fact of the Incar- 
nation is the identification of Christ with human- 
ity. The Son of God he was, in the highest sense, 
and he was also the Son of man. All that he did 
and suffered was for us men, not penally in our 
stead, but vicariously in our behalf. It was his 
great love for humankind that made him do what 
he did and bear what he endured ; we are, whether 
we acknowledge him or not, the beneficiaries of his 
self-sacrificing love. The world we live in is a 
vastly different world from what it would have 
been if he had not lived and died in it ; and it 
must be impossible for us to reflect on all this with- 
out being touched with a sense of our deep indebt- 
edness to him. 

But there is something more than memory, some- 
thing deeper than gratitude, in the heart of him 
who worthily observes this ordinance. When it is 
all that it ought to be, it becomes — what we com- 
monly call it — a communion^ — Kotvwvta. And a 
communion is simply a fellowship. The deepest 
purpose of the sacrament is not only to help us to 
think about him, and to be grateful to him, but 
also to bring us into vital, spiritual fellowship with 
him, so that we shall have his mind in us, and be 
partakers of his nature ; so that his life shall be 
reproduced in our lives, and we shall in some mea- 
sure learn to see the world with his eyes, to. think 
as he thought, and to feel as he felt, and to act as 



278 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

lie acted. This is the real significance of the sym- 
bolism of the Supper. The bread and wine repre- 
sent the body and the blood of Christ ; his body is 
his personality, and the blood is the vital element 
of it, which is love. Now just as the bread and 
the wine of which we partake are taken up by the 
organs of digestion and assimilation, and become 
part of ourselves, bone of our bone and flesh of our 
flesh, so by our thought and our love the spiritual 
elements of Christ's personality, his thought and 
his love, become part of us ; we become partakers 
of his life, of his nature. There is nothing miracu- 
lous about this ; it is precisely the same thing that 
happens to us when we are brought into living sym- 
pathy with any strong, wise, loving human spirit. 
Something of his strength and wisdom and love 
passes into our spirits, and becomes part of our- 
selves. And precisely thus in our communion with 
the spiritual Christ do we become partakers of his 
life. 

" Christ is present in the elements," says Presi- 
dent Hyde, " just as the writer of a letter is pre- 
sent in the writing. The reading of the letter is 
the reception of the writer's mind and heart. We 
receive Christ in the bread and wine just as we re- 
ceive a friend when we clasp his hand. All com- 
munion between persons must be by symbols. As 
Professor Dewey says in his ' Psychology,' ' The 
first step in the communication of a fact of individ- 
ual consciousness is changing it from a psychical 
fact to a physical fact. It must be expressed 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 279 

through nou-conscious media, the appearance of 
the face or the use of sounds. These are purely 
externah The next step is for some other individ- 
ual to translate this expression or these sounds 
into his own consciousness. He must make them 
part of himself before he knows what they are. 
One individual never knows directly what is in the 
self of another ; he knows it only so far as he is 
able to reproduce it in his own self.' 

" Jesus in instituting the Lord's Supper has 
simply made universal the communication of his 
sacrificial love. He has made the bread and wine 
forever, and to all who receive it, the symbol of the 
life he lived and the death he suffered in love to 
all mankind. In itself, it is mere bread and wine. 
Translated by the intelligent and devout recipient 
into terms of the love and sacrifice it is intended 
to express, it becomes the bread of life and the wine 
of love to as many as receive it in this faith. Be- 
ing an objective institution, coming at stated times 
and places, it is independent of the wayward 
caprice, the fickle mood, the listless mind of the 
individual. And so it calls us back from our 
worldliness, deepens our penitence, quickens our 
love, and intensifies our consecration ; and, above 
all, identifies us with the great company of our 
fellow Christians, as no mere subjective devotion 
and private prayer could ever do." ^ 

1 Outlines of Social Theology, pp. 194-196. 



XIV 

THE HOPE OF DUMORTALITY 

" If a man die," said Job mournfully, " shall lie 
live again ? " It is the question of the ages. Who 
can confidently answer it ? What assurance have 
we of the fullness of life beyond the grave ? As 
for Job he had none. His question implies a neg- 
ative answer. Doubtless he believed in some dim, 
shadowy, slumberous existence beyond the grave, 
but it was nothing that we could call life. The 
conception of the ancient Hebrews was substan- 
tially the same as that of the Homeric poems. 
" Homer," says Dr. Gordon, " contemplates death 
as a calamity ; with him, life after death is a help- 
less existence in the regions of murky gloom." In 
the Odyssey, Homer tells us of the visit of Odys- 
seus to the underworld and of his sorrow as he 
greeted there the " strengthless dead " whom he 
had known in life. Agamemnon came forth to 
meet Odysseus ; he knew him instantly, " and he 
cried aloud, and let the big tears fall, and stretched 
forth his hand eagerly to grasp me. But no, there 
was no strength nor vigor left, such as was once 
within his supple limbs. I wept to see him, and I 
pitied him from my heart." " Mock not at death," 



THE HOPE OF IMMOKTALITY 281 

says the spirit of Achilles to Odysseus. " Better 
to be the hireling of a stranger, and serve a man 
of mean estate whose living is small, than be the 
ruler over all these dead and gone." The Hebrew- 
poet puts the case more tersely when he says : " A 
living dog is better than a dead lion." These an- 
cients held to some continuance of being after 
death, but it was only the ghostly simulacrum of 
life for which they looked. 

You may be thinking of those often quoted words 
of Job : " I know that my Redeemer liveth, and 
that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth, 
and though after my skin worms destroy this body, 
yet in my flesh shall I see God." It is doubtful 
whether there is another text in the Bible which 
has been worse misused than this one. Transla- 
tors have read their own meanings into it, instead 
of trying to reproduce the thought of Job. Job 
has been grossly accused by his three friends : 
they have insisted that his calamities are punish- 
ments inflicted upon him by the Judge of all the 
earth, for his own evil deeds ; he knows that this 
cannot be, and he declares that his Vindicator will 
by and by appear, and do him justice ; even though 
his skin be destroyed, yet from his flesh he will see 
God, his Vindicator, who will stand on his side and 
acquit him of these accusations. That is the whole 
of it ; there is no suggestion here of a resurrection 
of the body, or the continuance of being after death 
in a bodily form. We do not go back to those 
dark days for evidences of the life to come. The 



282 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

conceptions on which our own belief rests were not 
then fully formed in the minds of men. The ex- 
pectation of immortality has been, in large mea- 
sure, the product of a moral evolution. The basis 
of this expectation is far broader and far deeper 
now than it was two thousand years ago. 

Yet it ought to be said at the outset that we 
have no scientific demonstration of immortality. 
No future event can be scientifically demonstrated. 
All the astronomers and physicists on earth cannot 
prove that the sun will rise to-morrow morning. 
The future, to the scientific man as well as to the 
religious man, is the domain of faith, not of know- 
ledge. I cannot undertake to furnish any man 
with proof drawn from mathematical or physical 
science that there is life for him beyond the grave. 
So far as our reasoning faculties are concerned, the 
life to come can be to us nothing more than a ra- 
tional probability. And this probability will not 
rest on any single line of evidence, but on consid- 
erations drawn from many different groups of facts 
and experiences. The cable of that anchor of hope 
by which our hearts are held to the life everlasting 
is braided of many strands. I shall try to bring 
before your thought some of the elements which 
are woven into this great expectation. 

And first it may be well to say negatively that 
although physical science can give us no proof of 
immortality it is equally impotent to furnish any 
disproof of it. We know, indeed, that the mind, in 
the present state of existence, uses the body as its 



THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 283 

medium of communication with the outside world ; 
we do not know that the mind may not be sepa- 
rated from this body, and may not find other in- 
struments and organs. Certain nervous changes 
always take place in the human body when the hu- 
man mind is thinking, but these nervous changes 
are not thought, any more than the mechanical 
motion of my hand when I write is a process of 
thinking. " We may succeed," says Professor 
Ferrier, " in determining the exact nature of the 
molecular changes which occur in the brain cells 
when a sensation is experienced ; but this will not 
bring us one whit nearer the explanation of the ul- 
timate nature of that which constitutes the sensa- 
tion. The one is objective and the other subjec- 
tive ; and neither can be expressed in terms of the 
other. W,e cannot say that they are identical, or 
even that the one passes into the other, but only, 
as Lay cock expresses it, that they are correlated." 
But while biological and chemical science can 
neither prove nor disprove the separate existence 
of the soul, and its continuance after the death of 
the body, there are certain large considerations, 
drawn from the philosophy of evolution, which lend 
great strength to that belief. I quoted largely, in 
the first chapter, from Mr. Fiske's recent remark- 
able essay on " The Everlasting Keality of Eeli- 
gion," to show that the elements of religion had 
been evolved in the upward movement of the race ; 
that these elements of religion are universal con- 
stituents of human nature ; and that it is just as 



284 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

unpMlosopliical and preposterous, according to the 
doctrine of evolution, that such organs of faith 
should be developed in human beings, without any- 
corresponding spiritual realities with which they 
could be coordinated, as it would be to suppose that 
the eye could have been developed where there was 
no light, or the ear where there was no sound. The 
existence of these spiritual faculties in man, as the 
outcome of evolution, is proof that there is a spirit- 
ual world with which they are coordinated. 

N'ow Mr. Fiske tells us that one of the elements 
of religion which is essential and universal is the 
belief in the continuance, in some form, of the hu- 
man soul after death. " The savage custom of 
burying utensils and trinkets for the use of the de- 
parted enables us," he says, " to trace it back into 
the glacial period. We may safely say that for 
more than a hundred thousand years mankind have 
regarded themselves as personally interested in 
two worlds, — the physical world which daily greets 
our waking senses, and another world, compara- 
tively dim and vaguely outlined, with which the 
psychical side of humanity is more closely con- 
nected. This belief in the Unseen World seems 
to be coextensive with theism ; the animism of the 
lowest savage includes both. No race or tribe of 
men has ever been found destitute of belief in a 
ghost world. Now a ghost world implies a per- 
sonal continuance of human beings after death, 
and it also implies identity of nature between the 
ghosts of man and the indwelling spirits of sun, 



THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 285 

wind, and flood. It is chiefly because these ideas 
are so closely interwoven in savage thought that it 
is often so difficult to discriminate between fetich- 
ism and animism. These savage ideas are of 
course extremely crude in their symbolism. With 
the gradual civilization of human thinking the re- 
finement in the conception of the Deity is paral- 
leled by the refinement in the conception of the 
Other World. From Valhalla to Dante's Paradise 
what an immeasurable distance the modern mind 
has traveled ! 

" In our modern monotheism the assumption of 
kinship between God and the human soul is the 
assumption that there is in man a psychical ele- 
ment, identical in nature with that which is eter- 
nal. Belief in a quasi-human God and belief in 
the soul's immortality thus appear in their origin 
and development, as in their ultimate significance, 
to be inseparably connected. They are part and 
parcel of one and the same efflorescence of the hu- 
man mind." ^ 

This argument rests, as you see, upon the integ- 
rity of what you may call Nature, — if you choose 
so to name it. Nature, let us say, has been at 
work for a good many hundred thousand years, in 
producing man. It has fitted him with certain 
powers and aptitudes, and these always correspond 
to the conditions of his environment. It has de- 
veloped the eye, and there is the light which puts 
him into visual relations with surrounding objects. 
1 Through Nature to God, pp. 160, 170. 



286 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

It has developed the ear, and the waves of sound 
bring him messages from the outside world. It 
has endowed him with the great mathematical con- 
ceptions, — the ideas of number and form, — and 
every existence that he finds in the space that sur- 
rounds him repeats to him these ideas, and verifies 
to him the thought that is native to his mind. The 
world without corresponds to the soul within. If 
this is the method of Nature, then faculties as 
deep-seated, as persistent, as universal as the reli- 
gious faculties must have something corresponding 
to them in the universe. If the mathematical fac- 
ulty implies a mathematical world, why does not 
the spiritual faculty imply a spiritual world? The 
reality of all these other correspondences argues 
the reality of religion. 

For, as Mr. Fiske told us in the first chapter, 
these religious faculties are entitled to rank among 
the very highest in our nature. " One aspect of 
the fact," he says, " not to be lightly passed over is 
that religion, thus ushered upon the scene coeval 
with the birth of humanity, has played such a 
dominant part in the subsequent evolution of hu- 
man society that what history would be without it 
is quite beyond our imagination. As to the di- 
mensions of this cardinal fact there thus can be no 
question. None can deny that it is the largest and 
most ubiquitous fact connected with the existence 
of mankind upon the earth." ^ 

That Nature for a thousand aeons should have 
1 Through Nature to God, pp. 188, 189. 



THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 287 

employed herself in awakening, refining, enlarging, 
strengthening, the religious impulses in the soul of 
man, when there were no objective facts toward 
which these impulses could be directed, is not, I 
think, to the philosophic mind, a credible supposi- 
tion. Our faith in the integrity of the universe is 
our warrant for believing that the primary concep- 
tions of religion are everlasting realities. And 
these indispensable elements of religion are, in the 
words of Mr. Fiske, " first, belief in Deity as quasi- 
human ; secondly, belief in an Unseen World in 
which human beings continue to exist after death ; 
thirdl}^, recognition of the ethical aspects of human 
life as related in a special and intimate sense to 
this Unseen World. These three elements are 
alike indispensable. If any one of the three be 
taken away the remnant cannot properly be called 
a religion." ^ 

It may be said — it is often said by those who 
imagine that they are thus getting rid of spiritual 
realities — that the faculties of man are the result 
of natural forces working upon him ; that the eye, 
for example, was produced by the action of the 
light upon some sensitive surface ; that the light 
playing upon the pigment stirred it, assembled 
and organized its tissues, and thus, during ages of 
transmitted and slowly developed visual powers, 
created the wonderful organ which we call the eye. 
But it would seem, to begin with, that there must 
have been in that sensitive pigment some capacity 
1 Through Nature to God, pp. 174, 175. 



288 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

and some tendency to respond to the action of the 
light. The sunshine awakens and develops the 
plant germ, but the germ was there to awaken. 
The light may well have been the agency through 
which the eye was developed, but the preparation 
of the living tissues for the action of the light was 
not, probably, neglected. And the same thing is 
true of the religious faculties. It is not only true 
that their existence argues a spiritual realm with 
which they are in communion, it is also true that 
they exist because of the direct action of the powers 
of that spiritual realm upon the human intelligence. 
It is no more true that the bodily eye is the effect 
of the action of the light upon sensitive physical 
tissues than that the spiritual vision, by which we 
discern God, has been quickened and developed by 
the direct action of the spirit of God upon our 
spirits. For God is light, and in Him is no dark- 
ness at all ; and it is in his light that we see light. 
The idea of God in the soul of man is the response 
to direct impressions of God made upon the 
soul itself. " Reality," says Dr. Gordon, " casts 
its own image in the mind, and God, as Eeality, 
has shadowed himself in the soul. There is no ad- 
equate account of God other than the fact of God. 
Similarly with duty it is an ultimate fact ; there is 
no complete explanation of it short of its recogni- 
tion as the effect in man's spirit of moral law. The 
idea of immortality belongs with those of God and 
duty. It comes spontaneously because of a per- 
ceived invisible and spiritual order to which the 



THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 289 

soul belono^s. There is an instinctive feelinsf of 
kinship between that order and the human spirit. 
Upon the human spirit that order makes the im- 
pression that its home is eternal in the heavens." ^ 
The presence of these feelings in the human 
soul is thus accounted for by the strict application 
of the evolutionary philosophy. They must, ac- 
cording to this philosophy, have arisen from the 
action and reaction of the soul of man and its en- 
vironment ; and the whole logic of evolution goes 
to establish the fact that God and the spiritual 
world are the commanding facts in the environ- 
ment of the human intelligence. 

Another argument from analogy rests on the great 
scientific doctrine of the persistence of force. It is 
assumed as the foundation of all scientific reasoning, 
and is proved by a wide induction of facts, that no 
force is lost ; that forms of energy are simply trans- 
formed in the physical and chemical changes. Mo- 
tion is changed into heat, and heat into light and elec- 
tricity ; and the chemical changes that take place 
in the processes of life and death are simply trans- 
formations of energy. The food that we take into 
the system is transformed into blood and tissue and 
nervous force ; and the death of the body is a sim- 
ple redistribution of these chemical elements. To 
the physical world nothing is lost by this redistri- 
bution. Every particle of force in the body enters 
into other combinations and goes on with its work. 
" Evolution teaches us," says one writer, " that no 

1 The Witness to Immortality, p. 26. 



290 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

force can be destroyed : it can only be transmitted." 
If this is true of tbe physical forces, how about 
the spiritual forces ? The force that manifests 
itself as reason, will, conscience, affection — is not 
that a real force ? That it can be resolved into 
atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon is believed, 
"I think, by very few scientific men at the present 
day. It belongs to a different series, and there is 
no evidence whatever that the two pass into each 
other. What then becomes, at death, of the force 
which manifests itself as reason, will, conscience, 
affection ? Does that come to an abrupt termina- 
tion ? Is Nature careful to carry over the forces of 
the physical series, while she drops the forces of 
the spiritual series? Does she give to the lower 
part of man's nature the power of continuance, while 
she denies it to the higher? Is chemical affinity 
a more precious thing in the universe than spiritual 
affection ? Must atoms endure while spirits decay ? 

Another and more familiar argument is drawn 
from the conception which evolution gives us of the 
final cause of its own great processes. It does not 
seem to justify itself to our reason, unless it pro- 
mises us an endless future for the human race. Let 
me quote a few words from Dr. Gordon's clear re- 
statement of this argument : — 

" Man is Nature's highest product, and he is a 
product of inconceivable cost. Toward him Nature 
has been looking forward from a past indefinitely 
remote. When she was concerned chiefly with the 
dance of atoms, with the play of the primitive fiery 



THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 291 

mist, she had the thought of him in her great heart ; 
when she was elaborating worlds, setting the solar 
system on high, forming this planet of onrs, and 
preparing it for life, man was still her darling idea, 
and in the vast procession of life from the barely 
to the highly organized, he was never for one mo- 
ment ont of sight. The evolntion, rnnning through 
countless ages, in innumerable forms, at a cost of 
energy and suffering inconceivably great, was all 
the while aspiring to manhood. The whole crea- 
tion groaned and travailed in pain until the mani- 
festation of the sons of God. Man is Nature's last 
and costliest work. The flower of being is intelli- 
gence and love. The outcome of evolution through 
self-seeking is a form of being that confronts self- 
seeking as no longer an indispensable friend, but a 
disastrous embarrassment, that begins through self- 
sacrifice a yet more stupendous evolution. Can it 
be that this last and finest product of Nature, this 
result of intelligence and love aimed at from the 
beo'innino' and reached at a cost immeasurable, 
shall not be conserved in growing beauty and 
power forever ? Physical evolution finds its goal in 
man, and the process that hereupon begins finds its 
end in the complete realization of his ethical and 
spiritual nature." ^ 

This is the argument, and to some minds it will 

have great force. For every order of creatures 

below man there is something higher and nobler 

toward which to reach upward. Evolution has 

1 The Witness to Immortality, p. 20. 



292 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

been conducting this agelong progress from moUusk 
up to man. " From cosmic dust," says Dr. Hun- 
ger, " man has become a true person. What now ? 
The end of the demiurgic strife reached, its methods 
cease. Steps lead up to the apex of the pyramid. 
What remains ? What, indeed, but flight, if he be 
found to have wings ? Or does he stand for a mo- 
ment on the summit, exulting in his emergence 
from nature, only to fall back into the dust at its 
base ? There is a reason why the reptile should 
become a mammal : it is more life. Is there no 
like reason for man ? Shall he not have more life ? 
If not, then to be a reptile is better than to be a 
man, for it can be more than itself ; and man, in- 
stead of being the head of nature, goes to its foot. 
The dream of pessimism becomes a reality, justify- 
ing the remark of Schopenhauer that consciousness 
is the mistake and malady of nature. If man be- 
comes no more than he is, the whole process of gain 
and advance by which he has become what he is 
turns on itself and reverses its order. The benevo- 
lent purpose, seen at every stage till it yields to the 
next, stops its action, dies out, and goes no farther. 
The ever-swelling bubble of existence, that has 
grown and distended till it reflects the light of hea- 
ven in all its glorious tints, bursts on the instant 
into nothingness." ^ 

The impossibility of entertaining such a pessi- 
mistic view of the whole history of life on the 
earth drives us to the conclusion that the crown of 
1 The Appeal to Life, p. 269. 



THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 293 

life is immortality All the reasons which I have 
produced for believing in the continuance of life be- 
yond the grave have been drawn from the doctrine 
of evolution, and the modern scientific theories 
closely connected with it. Fifty j^ears ago no such 
reasonings as these could have occurred to any 
Christian thinker. I know not how they may have 
impressed other minds ; to my own they come home 
with great power. So far as I have a reasoned 
theory of the existence of God and of the future 
life, it rests, very largely, on the truth brought to 
light by the evolutionary philosophy. All who will 
take pains to find out what are the larger implica- 
tions of this philosophy will, like Mr. John Fiske, 
find their faith in the everlasting reality of religion 
deepened and confirmed. 

Many other lines of argument might be fol- 
lowed ; I must content myself with alluding to two 
or three considerations only. 

The testimony of Jesus Christ is to me a word 
of authority. Above all who have lived on this 
planet he was surely Master of the lore of the 
spirit. His insight into character, his revelation 
of man to himself, and of God to man, show him 
to have had a knowledge of the deep things such 
as no other teacher has possessed. Just as I would 
take the word of Edison or Tesla about the laws 
of electricity, just as I would take the word of 
Peirce on a question of mathematics, or of Gray on 
a question of botany, certainly, with not less confi- 
dence, would I take the word of Jesus Christ upon 



294 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

any great question of tlie spirit. And liis word is 
always clear and positive and unhesitating. " We 
speak that we do know," he says, " and testify that 
we have seen." There is with him no arsrument to 
prove the life to come ; it is assumed as one of the 
indubitable certainties. Nay, our Lord domesti- 
cates it, as it were ; he brings it right home to our 
every-day experience ; his word is not immortality 
— that seems something future, and far away ; he 
calls it eternal life. It begins here, he tells us ; 
we may be living it now. There is a kind of life 
that in its very nature is deathless ; it goes on by 
its own momentum. This is the life that he is liv- 
ing. They who share his life have the witness in 
themselves ; for them there is no death. The testi- 
mony of Jesus is to me a great and solemn assur- 
ance, and I rest m}^ soul upon it without fear. 

The other sure foundation for this belief is in 
the truth which Jesus cleared and lifted into the 
light, — the truth that the Eternal God is our Fa- 
ther. This, as we have seen, is one of the three 
gTeat realities of religion ; but this is first and 
greatest of them all. On this everything that 
makes life dear and beautiful finally depends. If 
this is true all is weU ; life is sweet and death is 
gain. If God 's in his heaven, all 's right with the 
world — with all the worlds. If God is good, if 
God is our Father, the life unending is our sure 
portion. Faith in Him is guarantee to us that our 
highest hopes and purest aspirations will not mock 
us ; that we shall not " be cast as rubbish to the 



THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 295 

void " when the curtain falls upon the last scene 
of all that ends this strange, eventful history. The 
hunger of the heart for more life, and fuller, is the 
deepest craving that we know, and in the noblest 
souls it is the strongest. Who of us has ap- 
proached the goal of his aspiration ? Who does 
not feel in his most exalted moments the poverty 
of his attainments, the incompleteness of his life. 
So little do we know, so vast is the chasm between 
what we have meant to be and what we are, that if 
death were the end of it all our sense of the failure 
of life would come down upon us with crushing 
weight. Yet this very consciousness of incom- 
pleteness, this outreaching of the soul for more life, 
and fuller, is proof of immortality, if God is good. 
This is Kant's great argument. " Be perfect," is 
the mighty voice that through every soul forever 
reverberates. But for us perfection can only be 
reached by endless progress toward an endlessly 
receding goal. Therefore man must have eternity 
as the field of his moral development. No smaller 
opportunity is large enough for his powers. The 
moral ideal in the soul, the categorical imperative 
of duty, are the outfit for a life unending. Be- 
cause God is good it must be that we can be what 
we know we ought to be. And that means more 
days than were ever given to any man upon this 
earth. 

Every man, at his best, has the consciousness 
not only of incompleteness, but of unexhausted 
powers. As we draw toward the end of life our 



296 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

conception of the vastness of the work opening be- 
fore us, of the multitude of the things that we 
might do if there were only time, constantly en- 
larges. The word of the Master begins to be in- 
telligible : " I have a baptism to be baptized with, 
and how am I straitened till it be accomplished." 
We are just getting ready to work, just begin- 
ning to feel the pressure of the great motives of 
life, when the evening shadows fall, and the day's 
work is done. If this is the end, existence is a 
mockery ; if God is good, those whose deepest de- 
sire is to glorify Him will have another day. 

But there is a profounder truth than this. It is 
not only true that an Infinite Father must give to 
the children of his love the opportunity of realizing 
the impulses that He has planted in their souls and 
of doing the work that He is calling them to do, it 
is also true that if the life of God, which is the life 
of love, is the inspiration of our lives, we have in 
ourselves the foretaste of immortality. " God is 
love," says the great apostle ; " and he that abideth 
in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him." 
To such a life as that, what change can come but 
that which leads from strength to strength, from 
glory to glory ? And every one of us whose heart 
is the home of a pure affection knows something 
of what this means. For love, as Dr. Hunger 
says, " cannot tolerate the thought of its own end. 
It has but one word, — forever. Its language is. 
There is no death." This is the thought which 
glorifies Tennyson's " In Memoriam." As Dr. 



THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 297 

Gordon says, " The poem as a prophecy of immor- 
tality has its foundations in fact, the fact of love 
and its quality. ... It is in a very large sense a 
poem of the reason, a vital movement of thought 
through all difficulties into the conviction that God 
is love and that love is imperishable." ^ 

Thus we have separated by our thought, that we 
might unite them again by our larger reason, the 
strands that form the cable by which the anchor 
of the soul is held to that within the veil. Each 
of these considerations seems to me very strong', 
all of them together form an argument of faith 
on which our souls may repose. Our confidence 
in the integrity of Nature and in the persistence 
of spiritual forces ; our belief that evolution does 
not bring us up to the summits of existence, there 
to plunge us back again into nonentity ; our trust 
in the testimony of Jesus, to whom is given the 
word of eternal life ; our faith in the fidelity of 
God, who will not mock us by setting before us an 
impossible ideal, — all join to confirm our expec- 
tation of life beyond the grave. It is an ennobling 
confidence. In the days of darkness, in the hours 
when the burdens are heavy and the combat is 
fierce, it lifts up the head and lightens the heart. 
It is sometimes said to be a selfish faith, — this 
faith in the life everlasting. But I see not how 
the triumph of love can be the gain of selfishness. 
And the man who has the faith most firmly planted 
in his heart is the man whose life is rooted and 
1 The Witness to Immortality, pp. 125, 126. 



298 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

grounded in love. One may have some intellectual 
reasons for believing in it, but that strong expecta- 
tion of it which fills the heart with assurance is the 
possession of those only who have something better 
than selfish ends to live for. " Men who have re- 
nounced their individual happiness," says Count 
Tolstoi, " never doubt their immortality. Christ 
knew that he would continue to live after death 
because he had already entered into the true life 
which cannot cease. He lived even then in the rayfc, 
of that other centre of life toward which he was ad- 
vancing, and he saw them reflected on those who 
stood around him. And this every man who re- 
nounces his own good beholds ; he passes in this 
life into a new relation with the world for which 
there is no death, and this experience gives him an 
immovable faith in the stability, immortality, and 
eternal growth of life." And here is the whole 
secret of this vitalizing faith. If you live the kind 
of life that ought to last, you will find it easy to 
believe in life eternal ; if you live the kind of life 
that ought to perish, you must not expect that any 
of the proofs of future existence will bring any 
strong assurance to your soul. 

To every one of us, as the days of our years 
pass swiftly, as a tale that is told, and the friends 
of our hearts one by one go on before us into the 
world of the unseen, this expectation of the life 
to come ought to grow stronger and clearer. It 
may be a jubilant hope, like that of the buoyant 
Browning, who, in his very last verses, hailed with 



THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 299 

a shout of triumph the portals before which so 
many tremble : — 

" At the midnig-lit in the silence of the sleep-time, 
When you set your fancies free, 
Will they pass to where — by death, fools think, imprisoned — 
Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so, 

— Pity me ? 

" Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken ! 
What had I on earth to do 
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly ? 
Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless did I drivel, 

— Being — who ? 

" One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, 
Never doubted clouds would break. 
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would tri- 
umph. 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
Sleep to wake. 

" No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time 
Greet the unseen with a cheer. 
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 
' Strive and thrive ! ' cry ' Speed, — fight on, fare ever 
There as here ! ' " 

Or it may be that the assurance will come to us 
in that serener and more peaceful mood of Tenny- 
son's last poem : — 

" Sunset and evening star. 

And one clear call for me ; 
And may there be no moaning of the bar 

When I put out to sea ; 
But such a tide as moving seems asleep. 

Too full for sound and foam, 
When that which drew from out the boundless deep 

Turns again home ! 



300 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

" Twilig-lit and eTening bell, 

And after that the dark ; 
And may there be no sadness of farewell 

When I embark : 
For though from out our bourne of time and place 

The flood may bear me far, 
I hope to see my Pilot face to face 

When I have crossed the bar." 

But whether we come to the end of life exultant, as 
the winner reaches the goal, or whether with hands 
folded on the quiet breast we drift upon the out- 
going tide to the shoreless ocean, let U3 trust that 
in all our hearts there may abide the hope that can- 
not fail, and the peace that passeth knowledge ! 



XV 

THE THOUGHT OF HEAVEN 

The principle of contrast has been overworked 
in religious philosophy. The relativity of know- 
ledge implies that we have no comprehension of 
anything except as we compare it with something 
else, and unlikeness strikes crude minds m_ore for- 
cibly than likeness. Cold is more easily distin- 
guished from heat than different degrees of cold or 
heat are distinguished from each other. Our more 
juvenile conceptions are apt to array themselves 
in antitheses : white, black ; long, short ; quick, 
slow ; high, low ; hard, soft ; good, bad. The child 
generally assumes that everything is either white 
or black, and that everybody is either good or 
bad. And there are children of a larger growth 
who carry this habit of contrast into all their think- 
ing, and put most of the individuals and the groups 
of whom they think into antithetical categories, — 
as saint, sinner ; patriot, traitor ; Protestant, Cath- 
olic ; orthodox, infidel ; Republican, Democrat, — 
with the notion that these stand over against each 
other in definite antagonisms ; that everybody must 
be the one or the other, and that all which can be 
affirmed of the one can be denied of the other. 



302 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

There is a kind of philosophy of history which 
makes use of this method ; which assumes that the 
forces which make for progress are conflicting 
forces ; that one period of time comes to a crisis 
and ends with a crash, and is then succeeded by 
another period in which powers exactly ojDposed to 
■ those formerly prevailing bear rule. The theory 
of history which is based on this conception is a 
theory of catastrophes and cataclysms ; the leading 
idea is contrast rather than continuity, conquest and 
not progress. Such a historian would be inclined 
to regard the Christian dispensation as the antithe- 
sis of the Jewish dispensation, and the American 
government as the antithesis of the English gov- 
ernment. But there is another theory of the uni- 
verse with which our minds are becoming more 
and more familiar, — namely, that the deepest law 
of life is a law of unfolding rather than of antago- 
nism, of continuity more than of contrast. Each 
period of time, according to this theory, has its 
roots in the period which preceded it ; history is 
not a succession of breaks and weldings, but an or- 
derly progress. One who accepts this theory can 
easily believe what Christ said about the relation 
of the kingdom which he came to found to the 
Jewish economy which had preceded it, — that the 
one is simply the continuation and completion of 
the other. " Think not, that I am come to destroy 
the law and the prophets ; I am not come to de- 
stroy, but to fulfill." To such a thinker, American 
institutions will appear to be as closely connected 



THE THOUGHT OF HEAVEN 303 

with English institutions as the stem is with the 
root. 

This conception, which helps to unify the whole 
of life, which binds the past and the future to- 
gether in a genetic relation, will greatly help us in 
answering our question, " What do we know about 
heaven?" The prevalent notion has been, no 
doubt, that heaven is the antithesis of earth. That 
thought has held comfort for many troubled and 
weary souls. In the midst of persecution and 
trials, it has always been reassuring for men to 
look away to the land beyond the grave and to say, 
" When we shall have reached that good place 
these miseries will no more overtake us." Thus, 
setting the safety and the purity and the blessed- 
ness of heaven over against the danger and the sin 
and the sorrow of earth, it was natural enough that 
men should extend the contrast to every other fea- 
ture of the two conditions, and learn to think of 
heaven as in all respects the antithesis of earth. 
But this is not, probably, the main truth about it. 
Panl couples the life that now is and that which is 
to come as if they were all of a piece ; the same 
qualities of character give us both ; both grow 
from the same root ; the one is but the completion 
of the other. And this, we may assume, is the 
true conception. When the first heaven and the 
first earth shall have passed away from the sight 
of any of us, and we find ourselves under a new 
heaven and in a new earth, I am fain to believe 
that it will not seem to us a strange place at all. 



304 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

It is pleasant for me to think that the life to come 
will not greatly differ in its characteristic features 
from the life that now is. 

Let us speak, first of those elements of the hea- 
venly life that are known to us, proceeding thus, 
by the true method of science, from the known to 
the unknown. I once heard a preacher tell a vast 
audience that no one knew anything about heaven 
except what the Bible tells him. The truth is that 
unless a man knows something about heaven that 
neither the Bible nor any other book can tell him, 
he will never find heaven, even though he take the 
wings of the morning, and range through space for 
ages. The substance of heaven, the heart of it all, 
is within us ; and we do not need to cry, " Lo here ! 
or lo there ! " pointing to promises in a book or 
to portents in the sky. That which is central and 
essential in life for every human being is charac- 
ter. The moral and spiritual elements make up 
the perfection of being in all worlds. Whether 
a man is in heaven, or not, depends, first of all, on 
what the man is. It is not the scenery, or the sur- 
roundings, that makes heaven ; it is the spiritual 
harmony within. The waves of our common air 
often bear to us sweet strains of the music of the 
land to which we go : — 

" We bless thee for thy peace, Lord, 
Deep as the unfathomed sea, 
Which falls like sunshine on the road 
Of those who trust in thee. 

*' That peace which suffers and is strong, 
Trusts where it cannot see, 



THE THOUGHT OF HEAVEN 305 

Deems not the trial way too long, 
But leaves the end with thee ; 

*' That peace which flows serene and deep, 
A river in the soul, 
Whose banks a living verdure keep, 
God's sunshine o'er the whole." 

In words like these, we feel upon our foreheads the 
very breath that ripples the river of the water of 
life. 

" My God, I thank thee who hast made 
The earth so bright, 
So full of splendor and of joy, 

Beauty and light ; 
So many glorious things are here 
Noble and right. 

" I thank thee, too, that Thou hast made 

Joy to abound ; 
So many gentle thoughts and deeds 

Circling us round ; 
That in the darkest spot of earth 

Some love is found. 

" I thank thee. Lord, that thou hast kept 
The best in store ; 
I have enough, yet not too much 

To long for more, — 
A yearning for a deeper peace 
Not known before." 

He who can speak such words truly has no need to 
climb to the heights, or fly to the far countries, in 
search of his heaven ; the substance of it is already 
in his possession. 

What the essential elements of the heavenly life 
will be we know perfectly. The truth and the 
trust, the purity and the peace, the abounding love 



^ 



306 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

and the unselfisli joy, which make life worth living 
here will be integral principles of life in all worlds 
so long as humanity reflects the image of the 
divine. 

We are not, then, drawing wholly on our imagi- 
nation when we speak of the life to come. One who 
can measure a small arc of a curve whose sweep is 
billions of miles in extent, can picture the whole of 
it ; he knows as well the direction it will take on 
the other side of Uranus as on this side. And one 
who knows what are the essential elements of moral 
and spiritual perfection in this world knows what 
is the substance of heaven. 

But we often think of the form and manner of 
that life, the scenery and costume of it, and wish 
that we might know how it will look, how it will 
seem. Doubtless all of us do, sometimes, picture 
to ourselves the life of that country. We can 
hardly help doing so. Some that are very dear to 
us are dwelling there, and our imagination will 
follow them and frame the landscapes through 
which they are moving, the skies that bend over 
them, the tasks that employ them. The bare out- 
line of such a picture I am going to sketch for you. 
And I ask you to remember that it is only an im- 
agination. I do not say that the manner of the 
heavenly life is what I shall represent it to be ; I 
only say, perhaps it is ; it may be ; this is the way 
I like to think it is. If any of you have a concep- 
tion that better satisfies your thought hold on to 
that ; I only offer you mine to think of in the hope 



THE THOUGHT OF HEAVEN 307 

that it may make heaven seem to some of you more 
human and more homelike. 

For this is my deepest thought about it : it will 
be home. That principle of continuity which 
guides all our thinking makes this highly probable. 
It will not be a foreign land ; it will be the home- 
land. 

I can imagine no heaven brighter than this 
world would be if sin and its consequences were 
abolished. And I always think of the form in 
which men will appear in heaven as being not un- 
like that in which they appear on earth. No form 
more beautiful is within the range of my imagi- 
nation than the physical ideal of humanity. The 
" human form divine," the poets call it, and that, 
I suppose, is the literal truth. The archetype is 
divine. The sculptor never tries to conceive of 
anything more shapely or more fair than this ; he 
would realize his highest ambition if he could re- 
produce the type of beauty which the human form, 
in its manifold incarnations, suggests to us. 

These two conceptions fit each other. If the 
world to come is to be in its scenery and its out- 
ward features similar to the world in which we live, 
such bodies as we now possess will seem to be 
adapted to it ; and if, on the other hand, bodies 
similar to these should be ours in the other world, 
we might naturally expect the environment of that 
life to be similar to the environment of this life. 

Is there any reason why the bodies we inhabit in 
the world to come should not be similar to those we 



308 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

inhabit here ? That they will be free from the de- 
formity and the corruptibility of our mortal bodies 
we may indeed believe, but in form and substance 
why may they not be like these bodies ? 

Some one answers that Paul promises us spirit- 
ual bodies in the life to come. But what is a spir- 
itual body ? The phrase, according to ordinary 
definitions, is a contradiction in terms, if it is un- 
derstood as describing the substance of the glorified 
body. Spirit and body are antithetical terms : a 
spirit is an incorporeal existence. If the words of 
Paul are taken ontologically they are, therefore, 
destitute of meaning ; it is like speaking of a white 
blackbird or an ascending declivity. Paul does 
not, probably, mean to say that our heavenly bodies 
will be made of immaterial material. I suppose 
that he must mean by a spiritual body a body that 
is perfectly under the control of the spirit ; a body 
that is a fit organ for the spirit, that does not re- 
fract the light of God when it shines into the soul, 
but is a perfect medium for its transmission ; a 
body that not only for purposes of 'impression, but 
also for purposes of expression, is the servant of the 
spirit. These earthly bodies often clog and ham- 
per the spirit : their fleshly appetites fight against 
its aspirations ; their infirmities paralyze its endea- 
vors ; but the bodies which we shall inhabit in the 
life to come will more perfectly answer the needs 
of the higher nature, and will aid instead of imped- 
ing the spirit's growth. This is why we call them 
spiritual bodies. 



THE THOUGHT OF HEAVEN 309 

But another is reQiinded of these words of Paul : 
" Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kinodoni of 
God." Certainly not this flesh and blood, — not the 
materials which constitute these bodies : the physi- 
cal substances of which they are composed are re- 
turned to the earth and the air. The notion that the 
identical matter of the physical organism which 
we leave behind for burial is to be reanimated is 
distinctly repudiated by Paul, and physiological sci- 
ence makes it impossible and absurd. 

What then, you may ask, do we mean by the 
resurrection of the body ? The question cannot 
be answered with any dogmatic assurance : I can 
only give what seems to me a possible explanation. 

The human body, like every other physical or- 
ganism, seems to be the product of a living princi- 
ple which chemical analysis does not isolate. There 
is something behind these chemical laws that com- 
mands them. We know very little about this ; we 
call it life : it is the builder that silently and with 
divine skill marshals the bioplasts and shapes the 
organism. Death is simply the abandonment by 
this silent builder of the materials upon which he 
has been at work. But there is no reason for be- 
lieving that he dies ; and what we call the resur- 
rection of the body may be only the calling of this 
builder up to a higher sphere, where, out of en- 
during and incorruptible material, he constructs 
another tabernacle for the spirit, and thus, we who 
are unclothed of this mortal covering, are clothed 
upon with our house which is from heaven. But 



310 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

if it shall be tlie same life principle which shall re- 
construct our bodies there, then it is certain that 
their general type and pattern will be like those 
that we inhabit here. If the organizing principle 
is the same, the organism must at least be similar. 

Certain reasonings confirm, in my thought, this 
. expectation. 

A large part of the education we receive in this 
world is in and through the bodily senses. From 
the moment when the infant begins to measure dis- 
tances by putting forth his hand to grasp a candle 
that he cannot reach, to the last day of the old 
man's life, when his practiced eye scans the coun- 
tenances of the watchers by his bedside to discern 
if he can their judgment concerning his fate, there 
is a constant accumulation of knowledge and disci- 
pline which have come into the soul through the 
portals of sense. Not only are new truths thus con- 
tinually revealed to the mind, but the mind is also 
steadily acquiring new skill in the use of these or- 
gans. Our senses are nice instruments, which dur- 
ing the whole of our life we are learning to operate ; 
and the degree of expertness which is thus acquired 
would be marvelous if it were not so common. 
How accurately, for example, do we learn at length 
to use the sense of touch ; how perfectly do we dis- 
cern shapes and surfaces and textures with our eyes 
closed. So with all the senses. We spend our 
years in learning to use them, and the proficiency 
we gain is wonderful. We marvel at the brilliant 
Paderewski when we see his swift fingers dance so 



THE THOUGHT OF HEAVEN 311 

fairily up and down the keyboard. What wonder- 
ful mastery, we exclaim, of a wonderful instrument ! 
But we do not often reflect that upon an instru- 
ment far more delicate, the human body, we have 
all learned to perform far more wonderful feats of 
skill. You are listening to Paderewski : and your 
ear catches and individualizes and records every 
one of those rapidly uttered notes, forms them into 
musical phrases, detects and delights in the harmo- 
nies into which they are woven, presents, momently, 
to your thought, this marvelous complex of sweet 
sounds. And how manifold are the impressions 
hourly brought to your mind through this one 
avenue of sense ! The whisper of the breeze, the 
rustle of the leaves, the buzz of the insect, the chirp 
of the sparrow, the scream of the jay, the whistle 
of the distant locomotive, the click of the horse's 
hoofs and the rattle of wheels on the pavement, the 
shout of the children, the murmur of conversation 
in the next room, the ripple of the gas flame on the 
hearth — how quickly and surely do you distin- 
guish these impressions made upon the ear by 
the vibrations of the air ; how accurately, for the 
most part, do you judge of the distance and direc- 
tion from which these sounds have come ! All the 
senses, as I have said, are trained to a similar nicety 
and precision of action. We are not apt to count 
this as part of our education, because the most 
of it is gained unconsciously ; but it is really a 
large and highly important portion of the best edu- 
cation. 



312 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

Not only are we constantly adding to our skill 
in the use of the bodily senses, but they have 
played a large part in the formation of our char- 
acters. Most of our experiences of joy or grief, of 
pleasure or pain, are ministered to us through our 
senses. The mind is addressed, the emotions are 
awakened, the will is influenced, by impressions 
that come to us through the eye, the ear, the touch, 
the taste : temptations assail us through these ave- 
nues ; the training of our intellect, our judgment, 
our power of choice, our power of resistance, has to 
do, continually, with our senses. In short, it may be 
said that all our knowledge is colored through and 
through with sense impressions ; that all our moral 
and spiritual character has been built up out of ex- 
periences in which sensation is a large ingredient. 

Now if the bodies we inhabit in the other world 
were unlike these, all the j)roficiency which we 
have gained in the use of the organs of sense would 
be worthless. Is it reasonable to suppose that the 
Creator would give us these tools to use, and keep 
us using them for a lifetime, and then when we 
had fairly gained the mastery of them would take 
them from us and set us to work with new ones ? 
And when we find the elements of sensation mingled 
with all our accumulations of knowledge and ex- 
perience and character, — woven through and 
through the whole of it, and no more separable 
from it than the w^arp is separable from the web, 
— how utterly inconceivable it is that we should be 
placed after death in conditions of life to which all 



THE THOUGHT OF HEAVEN 313 

these elements of knowledge and character would 
be wholly irrelevant. It is much more reasonable 
to suppose that we shall have in the other life bod- 
ily organisms with which our spirits will be famil- 
iar, to the uses of which they are accustomed, tlian 
that we shall be placed in tabernacles all new and 
strange to us. I prefer to think that death will 
make no serious break in the continuity of our ex- 
perience ; that we shall take up the thread of exist- 
ence on the other side as we lay it down on this 
side : and that while the tone of life will be height- 
ened and its flavor sweetened, yet the ways of life 
will seem familiar ; the place will not be strange ; the 
new vesture of the spirit will not appear novel or 
unwonted. It may be something as one who comes 
back from a journey and finds his home improved 
and beautified, — many discomforts gone, the 
cramped rooms enlarged, the unsightliness put 
away, everything arranged as he had often wished 
to have it, yet still the same home, with the same 
dear associations, — the same hearth to sit by, the 
same windows to look out of, all the old quiet com- 
forts left, all the old appointments calling him back 
to the old ways of living. 

If, now, the form of our appearing in the world 
to come is similar to that which is vouchsafed us 
here, then it seems highly probable that the sur- 
roundings of life in that world will not be unlike 
those of the present life. External nature is fitted 
to our needs in this world. Man and his environ- 
ment were made for each other. Correlation is the 



314 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

word that expresses the connection between man 
and the physical realm ; and that law will hold 
good, no doubt, in the other world. 

It will not surprise me, then, when I awake in 
that land of which we think so much, but of whose 
scenery we know so little, if I find myself in a 
country not greatly different from that which I 
have learned to love. If we have bodies like these, 
then landscapes like these we here look upon — 
hill and valley, forest and field, meadow and river, 
verdure and blossoms, sunny skies and smiling 
fields, all these freed from every scar of the spoiler, 
wearing no hint of decay or changef ulness — will 
be pleasanter to our eyes and more instructive 
to our minds than any other scenes we could im- 
agine. . 

No poem about heaven was ever written that 
took stronger hold of the hearts of men than that 
one of Dr. Watts, beginning, " There is a land of 
pure delight." The instincts of humanity respond 
that if it is not a truthful picture of the heavenly 
world it is one that may well be true : — 

" There everlasting spring" abides 

And never withering flowers, — 
Death like a narrow sea divides 

This heavenly land from ours. 
Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood. 

Stand drest in living green, 
So to the Jews old Canaan stood 

While Jordan rolled between." 

Into this strain the hymnists often fall. Thus 
sings our own Dr. Ray Palmer : — 



THE THOUGHT OF HEAVEN 315 

" Are there brig-lit happy fields 

Where naught that blooms shall die, 
Where each new scene fresh pleasure yields 

And healthful breezes sigh ? 
Are there celestial streams 

Where living' waters glide 
With murmurs sweet as angel dreams, 

And flowery banks beside ? " 

And to him answers Thomas Olivers across the 
waves of a stormy sea and the snows of more than 
a hundred winters : — 

" The goodly land I see 

With peace and plenty blest, 
A land of sacred liberty 

And endless rest ; 
. There milk and honey flow. 
And oil and wine abound, 
And trees of life forever grow 
With mercy crowned." 

And this singer's note, carried back by the retreat- 
ing years, is echoed by David Dickson, who more 
than a century before him sung the praises of his 
" Mother dear, Jerusalem ! " 

" Right through thy streets with pleasing sound 

The flood of life doth flow, 
And on the banks on either side 

The trees of life do grow ; 
These trees each month yield ripened fruit, 

Forevermore they spring ; 
And all the nations of the earth 

To thee their honors bring." 

And again, from a day far down the centuries, 
seven hundred years ago, the saintly Bernard of 
Cluny began this song that the world has not yet 
ceased to sing : — 



316 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES ? 

" fields that know no sorrow, 
O state that fears no strife, 
O princely bowers, land of flowers, 
realm and home of life ! " 



This is poetry, you say, and poetry proves nothing. 
I am not sure of that. On a subject of this sort 
the poets are better authorities than the exegetes 
and the logicians. They can tell us something 
about the native and ineradicable instincts of the 
human heart. And those of ys who believe in a 
good God believe that these instincts were divinely 
implanted and do not universally crave that which 
God does not mean to give. 

If, now, the scenery of heaven be something like 
what these poets have imagined, — if field and 
wood and valley and hill and river and lakelet are 
to meet our vision, when we awaken in the life to 
come, — then it seems not irrational that this scen- 
ery will be inhabited and beautified by all kinds of 
animated existence. How lonely and forsaken would 
such a world as* ours appear if man were its only 
inhabitant 1 How desolate would the forests be if 
there were no song-birds to fill them with melody, 
no squirrels chattering among the boughs, no crick- 
ets chirping under the leaves ! How vacant would 
the landscape seem if there were no cattle feeding 
upon the plains, no lambs skipping upon the hill- 
side, no signs anywhere of happy animal life ! 

These fellow creatures of ours have their place 
in this world as well as w^e. We are fond of as- 
suming that the world was made for us, and in the 



THE THOUGHT OF HEAVEN 317 

highest sense it is true ; but there is plenty of evi- 
dence that it was made for them also, and that we 
without them could not be made perfect. The en- 
vironment is fitted to their wants as well as to 
ours ; they make up an important part of the 
happy harmony of nature, and I am not able to 
understand how their part can be spared from the 
symphony of life in the new heaven and the new 
earth. 

There is a passage in the Epistle to the Romans 
in which Paul pictures the whole creation as sharing 
with man in the sorrow and misery due to his sin, 
and as looking forward with eager expectation to the 
consummation of the redemptive work, because, as 
he says, *' the creation also shall be delivered from 
the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty 
of the sons of God." The sympathy and identifi- 
cation of nature with man in this world point on- 
ward to a continuance of the same relations in the 
world to come. He who thought external nature 
worth redeeming, with man, from the curse of sin 
would probably think it fit to be the environment 
of our life in all the ages of the future. 

There is another consideration which to my 
mind has some force. The study of Nature has 
always been to man, and is becoming more and 
more to the best men, a source of the highest in- 
struction and the deepest inspiration. Unsurveyed 
realms of truth are yet hidden from us in na- 
ture, waiting for us to come and explore their mar- 
velous treasures. Here is a fountain of knowledge 



318 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 



that is, to our largest comprehension, apparently- 
inexhaustible. And the truth which we thus seek 
in nature is God's truth. It is his thoughts that 
we find expressed in crystal and fossil, in tendril 
and tissue ; it is his truth that we have all been 
pondering and collating and trying to organize into 
systems. It does not seem reasonable to me that 
when we pass onward to the life beyond, the book 
out of which the Creator has permitted us to gather 
so many of his wonderful thoughts is to be forever 
closed to us ; that the secrets of nature which we 
have burned to know shall be forever sealed up. 
It is rather probable that with illuminated minds 
and unwearied powers we shall be permitted to 
carr}'^ forward these investigations, — to penetrate 
more and more deeply into these hidden stores of 
wisdom. And if we are to study natural history, 
we must live among natural objects. 

Such are some of the ways of thinking about 
the unknown future life which to my own mind 
have become natural and habitual. Much of all 
this is an inference, more or less legitimate, from 
that law of continuity which has come to rule in all 
the serious thinking of this generation. Y^et I do 
not hide from myself the fact that it is largely 
the vision of what may be rather than the affirma- 
tion of what is or must be. All I can say is that 
a conception like this makes the future life seem to 
me more real and more alluring than any other 
which I can frame. Believing, as I do, that the 
glory of going on is part of our high calling as the 



THE THOUGHT OF HEAVEN 319 

sons of God, I like to think of how it will be in that 
Unknown Country toward whose borders time is 
swiftly bearing us all. You could ask me many 
questions about it all which I could not answer ; 
you could point out to me, no doubt, anomalies and 
improbabilities in the conception I have shown you. 
But it is not a matter for dogmatism or controversy. 
Something like this the manner of the life to come 
may be. That is all I can say about it. If to any 
of you these thoughts bring heaven nearer, and 
take something of the dread from the darkened 
way that leads to it, I shall have done all that I 
hoped to do. 

One inference from all this reasoning is so obvi- 
ous that I scarcely need mention it. If heaven is 
anything like this, the doubt of the recognition and 
reunion of those who have loved one another here 
cannot disturb us. Individuality will not be lost 
in this transition. Our own will be their own dear 
selves. They may have grown fairer and lovelier, 
but the essential elements of personality will be 
preserved ; all the dear familiar traits and ways by 
which we knew them here we shall find in them 
there ; they will be ours at once and forever. Nay, 
they are ours even now. Let us never speak of 
them as though they were not. We are parted 
from them a little space — who can tell how far ? 
a little time — who knows how long ? But they 
belong to us as much as ever they did. Love is 
ownership. Love is not dead. Love gave them 
to us ; love knit our souls with theirs. Is death 



320 WHAT IS LEFT OF THE OLD DOCTRINES? 

mightier than love ? Nay, verily ; for He whose 
name is Love hath conquered death. God gave to 
us these friends of ours. Is not every good and 
perfect gift from above ? 

" God lent tliefn and took them, you sigh : 
Nay, there let me break with your pain ; 

God 's generous in giving-, say I : 

And the thing that he gives, I deny 
That he ever can take back again." 

Therefore, because He is good, and because his 
power is equal to his goodness, we believe that 
when we pass beyond the veil we shall soon find 
those who now, for a little while, are beyond our 
sight. The Infinite Love knows where they are 
and knows how much we need them, and his hand 
will quickly conduct us to the homes where they 
abide, to the places that they have made ready for 
us. Therefore from our hearts to them, and from 
their hearts to us, let sweet thoughts come and go 
like angels ascending and descending, weaving the 
web of hopes and imaginings between the life that 
now is and the life that is to come, and making the 
common joys of time the prelude and the promise 
of the life unending. 

" The good that we work for is hard to win, 
But our labor and worship are woven in 
To our marvelous web with the beauty we see, 
Unfolding from blossom and star and tree. 
That widens and lengthens and stretches above 
Out into the deeps of Invisible Love. 
O spirits dear, who have vanished from sight, 
You are only hid in a splendor of light 
That is as the dazzling soul of the sun ; 



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